Public Relations 3.0?

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ublic relations may be yet redefined in the ‘10s as the management of conversations not simply between a company or organization and its stakeholders, but the management of conversations between stakeholders. This constitutes the third step in PR’s evolution.

The early twentieth century view of public relations was not terribly audience friendly. Social scientists such Harold Lasswell, PR pioneer Edward Bernays and journalist cum commentator Walter Lippmann believed democracies should be equipped with muscular propaganda bureaus to help inform and guide the unwashed public. A good examination of this concept is found in an unlikely source, John M. Barry’s book about the 1918 influenza pandemic, The Great Influenza. According to Barry, Lippmann called “society too big, too complex” for the typical citizen, since most citizens were “mentally children or barbarians.” Under the influence of Lippmann and his acolytes, President Wilson created a Committee on Public Information to artfully guide the public’s opinion towards the Great War.

That was PR 1.0. The more enlightened view of the PR arts, which came into focus later in the twentieth century, was “the engineering of consent.” Or as the Public Relations Society of America says, PR ‘helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” A variation on this theme that I’ve used for years is that public relations is the creation and management of dialogue between an organization and its stakeholders or audiences.

The central theme here is that public relations must encourage a company to not just communicate to audiences (whether shareholders, customers, government) but to carefully listen to what these audiences are saying about the it and factor this intelligence into both its communications and policies.

Bravo. This makes a lot of sense as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. As everyone knows, today every individual is to some extent a megaphone or cub reporter. Trust in traditional news outlets is low (just see the always thoughtful Edelman Trust Barometer reports) but faith in outside experts such as physicians or academics is high and trust in individuals “just like me” is sky high.

What this means is that PR 3.0 is not just managing dialogue between the organization and its publics, but managing dialogue between its publics. Not simply arranging for key opinion leader Dr. Jones to talk to the news media about a new treatment for high blood pressure, but fostering talk between Mrs. Smith and Miss Riley about the treatment.

This obviously isn’t easy, and many clients, such as biopharmaceutical companies, shiver at the thought of spreading seeds of dialogue that can’t be recalled or controlled. But the green sprouts of this approach are seen in buzz marketing and our cautious outreach to interested bloggers. In the future we will see more examples of encouraging consumers to “talk among themselves” such as offering disease education videos on company Web sites not just for viewers, but for viewers to pass along to a friend or relative who is interested.

In our strategic approaches to public relations planning, lets remember that we need not simply find ways to communicate our messages, but find ways to encourage others to talk about our brands to their friends, relatives and colleagues.