By: Phil Gomes, Edelman Chicago
I recently had the great privilege of delivering a
talk at the PRSA International Conference that reflected
both a personal and professional
passion of mine. It was entitled “Hacking Public Relations: How Understanding and Embracing
Open-Source and Hacker Culture Is Critical to PR’s Future.”
For the purposes of the talk, “open source” was
defined as a set of values and processes whereby a system is open to
examination and any modifications are shared. “Hacker,” in the ethical
and non-pejorative sense, referred to someone with
a passion for learning how a system works as well as relentlessly improving it.
There are at least five imperatives that drive the
need for the public relations community to adopt these important precepts,
which I’ve outlined below:
1. Newsflash: Parts of PR’s “Source Code” Are
Already Leaking Anyway
The “operating system” (OS) of PR exists in a
semi-proprietary form across various companies, agencies and practitioners. For
those outside of the trade and the media sphere in general, relatively few
currently know how this OS really works, why it exists, why it’s
important or what it is actually capable of doing.
That said, the source code for the PR operating
system’s various “features” and “subsystems” has been leaking onto the Internet
for some time. This hasn’t been due to a dramatic Wikileaks- or Edward-Snowden-style unveiling (which, make no
mistake, is bound to happen eventually), but a slow reveal over time. For
example, think about the many ways pitches—certainly a core feature in PR’s
OS—have been examined in public
and, when maladroit, mercilessly criticized. This is to say nothing
of the subsystems for crisis management or
Wikipedia engagement.
2. Open-Source Values
and Practices the Same Things the PR Industry Ought To
Openness, transparency, accessibility… We frequently see calls from both within and outside the public relations industry to
adopt these principles—principles that map very closely to what open-source
communities and hackers value. While it’s presently naïve to think that more
than a small number of companies will go so far as to, say, lay their
product-design or engineering plans out there for the world (and competitors)
to see, I do believe that there is still a lot
of room for companies to make people participants
in their processes, rather than simply the recipients
of them. Opening, fostering and maintaining this necessary dialogue is PR’s
mandate.
3. Open-Source Is a
Proven Way to Deal with Complexity
Everyone can agree that the complexity involved in
public relations and marketing has skyrocketed in the past decade. The question is “How do we address
this?” and “What can we learn from communities who have done so?” I
believe that looking to open-source and hacker communities gives us the answer.
The open-source Linux operating system comprises
15 million lines of code. It takes thousands of volunteers committing more than
seven changes every hour to make it
work. This is to say nothing of the volunteers who test, document, translate
and evangelize the operating system. Sometimes these volunteers severely irritate the project’s founder, and
some would maybe even hurt each other
if they ever actually met. For all of that potential chaos, however, this
operating system powers 476 of the top 500 best-performing supercomputers out
there, as well as countless embedded devices.
Wikipedia is another topic about which I’m very fond. This massively collaborative online
encyclopedia has 29 million articles in more than 240
languages, built by about 1.7 million volunteers (and bots) who have each made
at least 10 edits. On one hand, it’s difficult to imagine how it hasn’t
completely flown apart. On the other, only through an open-source ethos can
something like Wikipedia even exist.
I don’t pretend to have all of the answers
here, but looking at these examples is extremely instructive in terms of
looking at how we address PR’s own complexity issues.
4. Open-Source and
Hacker Mores Are Compatible With Increasingly Hierarchy-Averse Audiences
One aspect of the Edelman Trust Barometer that I’ve found interesting is that people (both the general
publics that the Barometer now polls and
the media-attentive elites it has always looked at) maintain a particularly
strong aversion to hierarchy. Last year, CEOs and government officials rounded
out the bottom of this annual trust study, whereas “a person like yourself” has
continued to rise and is now among the top three most credible company spokespeople.
The top two over the past two years: academics (or otherwise subject-matter
experts) and technical experts within companies.
But aren’t even these people at the top of
a “hierarchy” of sorts? Not necessarily. Just like in open-source and
hacker communities, these are people who command respect and because 1) they
have close-to-the-data knowledge, and 2) they are typically very open about
sharing it. So, it’s not so much that they’re “at the top,” but that they earn
respect through expertise and access.
5. PR Must Prove Its
Value to Online Communities or It Will Be Treated as a Software Bug or Network
Damage
Open-source projects come together and draw
volunteers because groups of people find shared, mutual value in doing so. If
you have an itch to scratch, someone else probably has that very same itch and
is willing to help. In a recent post on my blog where I warn people
to approach content marketing thoughtfully, I urge the public relations
industry to seek that mutual value, lest it be viewed as a system “bug” to be
fixed or ignored. “If PR inspires people to build something that does to PR what TiVo was supposed to do to
television advertising, we'll know (perhaps too late) that we
failed.” To survive as a discipline, we must remain thoughtful, transparent and
valued members of communities, rather than just merely entities tasked with
influencing them.
What to do in such an
environment? My talk will offer several remedies for consideration. In the
meantime, sound off with your comments.
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