Mistrust Is Fueling Online Communications
The (anyway irrational) hope, web and social media would lead auto-magically to more transparency, more real dialogue, or better corporate citizens, was smashed by professionalization and commercialization in online communications. Maybe it’s time to rethink what strategic and value driven communication online might look like today.
The system is broken — and that’s the good news
That’s what MIT director Ethan Zuckerman called his keynote at the German conference re:publica in May. I fully agree with his analysis, which is worth listening to and watching in full length.
At the core his story is about how our modern society became a society of mistrust. How all studies show, that trust in institutions and corporations is declining steadily. How mistrust more and more determines the way we act in public and society. And, I would like to add, how communications is not able to do anything about this and even not to react accordingly.
I think we need to acknowledge that mistrust is not only a building block of our society — but is here to stay permanently.
Mistrust today is an underlying pattern of all the political, media or public discourses. Looking at this correct analysis we are able to find a new approach to strategic online communications. Ironically the social media gurus’ mechanics and doctrines that haven’t really been successful in the first place could help this time — notably transparence and dialogue. Because mistrust is here and is something we are confronted with all the time, let’s start from there.
I’m more and more convinced that mistrust today is the key to successful online communications and the right online strategy. Once we accept mistrust as a fact, and begin our program just there, we will be able to set new and promising goals. We give online communications a new additional role in the PR mix: to address mistrust and to deal with it without bullshit.
Strategically this approach means we are communicating in the arena of the “license to operate”.
While we normally focus with PR (and with advertising of course even more) on new ideas, products, or campaigns, we do not address mistrust or the license to operate. Or if we touch them this is only very remotely. That doesn’t matter; we can’t do it with every piece of communications. But online and especially in social media we definitely can do this very well.
In the end this will be a strategy of transparency (what is indeed ironic in a way and fairly retro) — a strategy with a close “view to the machine room” of the company; a strategy that acknowledges mistrust; a strategy that shows all the facts that are slightly diffent to what people out there would expect.
In the end the different elements of communications come together again: the strait view on the reality to deal with mistrust; the promotional view on all the good things we are doing; the glamorous view on our promises.
This is a way for strategic online communications to really help integrated communications to be successful. This way it is able to help other channels to fully leverage their strengths. And this way we are getting room and time to deal with mistrust in a productive and accepting way.
This post was originally published in German language by PR Magazin, where I serve as columnist, and can be found as well on LinkedIn Pulse.
