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Friday, March 03, 2006

Elizabeth Albrycht and David Phillips at New Communications Forum

Elizabeth Albrycht and David Phillips spoke as part of the Corporate Communications track:

Elizabeth Albrycht

• Elizabeth noted that the need to break down barriers in social networks is nothing new for organizations—we did this by building extranets to bring customers and companies closer together.
• It’s a gift economy—you can learn a lot from open source studies. Reputation and influence are the currencies (not currency itself). You have to contribute within these networks in order to receive. Reputation and influence are what we communicators are trained to do anyway. You have to engage. If nobody’s commenting to your blog, ask if you’ve contributed comments to other people’s blogs?
• Before you start blogging, ask what your organization can give—contribute—that nobody else can. It could be intellectual property, content archives, access to your talent, or data.
• Benefits of the network: Early-warning system. Network as prophylactic (it can defend and protect you). Your network may know more than you. Studies show collective knowledge production can produce better decisions (have you ever tried to brainstorm by yourself?).
• What is network building? Creating connections between and among key audiences. Identifying influencers and persuading them to discuss the organization and its offerings with friends and colleagues. Multiplying pathways customers and partners can use to talk to the organization allowing you to respond. Empower employees to share viewpoints and interests with each other, management, and people outside the organization.

David Phillips

• Talking about culture and its relationship to PR 3.0.
• Cultures are different from place to place, group to group. The New Communication Forum is a separate and unique culture. Share interests, understand concepts…makes us a special culture inside a wider cultural entity—we occupy a special cultural “space”
• Tokens and values—David gave a rose to a participant. That token changed perceptions through interpretation and application of your culture to the gesture. Tokens have values, are explicit, are unique to cultures. Based on shared culture, we can take value from participating and share it with other cultures, creating new value for those other cultures. Those cultures respond to our efforts by offering their own tokens and values. We’re in the cultural economy. People are different at different times, use different channels for communications for interactivity. People have an interest in different tokens at different times.
• Cultural economy marketing—people can choose to be retail or wholesale consumers, they can choose to create markets and ignore marketers, create products and be the manufacturer.
• Relationship management is the way forward.

Q&A

Social part is hard, Elizabeth says; technology part is easy. We’ve been trying to create a “brand relationship,” but we really don’t have relationships with a brand (an inanimate object or something that isn’t an object at all). We need to look at individuals and people to share and exchange ideas, values, and cultures.

Understand culture. Elizabeth was in Cambodia where everybody was using cell phones. Want to do business there? Better figure out how to reach people through their mobile tools. Need to use the technology used in the culture to build relationships (in addition to face-to-face, of course).

There are 24 direct communication channels available to PR people today, and it grows every few years; includes old technologies. We can use these to reach audiences within various cultures. Opportunities for PR people—bridge-builders—greater than ever before. Contradicts “PR/Marketing is dead” meme.

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