Technology changes faster than we do. Communications measurement has been especially affected by new technology, and that will continue to happen. Here are four important consequences you will have to adapt to:
1. Trust will be harder than ever to come by
The recent 2019 Disinformation in Society Report by the Institute for Public Relations revealed some pretty scary statistics. Morning Consult conducted the survey, which revealed that more than half of Americans come across “news or information that misrepresents reality” almost every day. 86% consider it a problem, and two out of three Americans cited either misinformation or disinformation as a major problem in America—just behind terrorism and gun violence.
As a result, most Americans have little trust in many of the sources we as professional communicators rely on to get the word out. Essentially, Americans told the researchers that they trusted their families, friends, and “people like me.” After that came Internet search engines and local news. At the bottom of the list: USA Today and Fox News. So next time you’re calculating the “Earned Media Value” of that mention on Fox or in USA Today, you might want to factor in the lack of credibility of the news source.
Those of you investing in “influencer marketing” strategies, take heed: celebrities were also at the bottom of the trustworthy rankings. And, not to rain on your social media parade, but when the researchers asked what people found “not at all trustworthy,” Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook topped the list. Interestingly, only one in five said that YouTube and LinkedIn weren’t trustworthy.
There seems to be universal recognition that foreign “bots” are to blame for the worst of this. Still, Americans also blame politicians (45%), President Trump (40%), Fox News (30%), and CNN (28%) for spreading disinformation.
The lesson here is to build trust via deeds, not words or “placements.”
2. Anger and passion will be tools of your trade
If you think the Russians are the only ones who have figured out how to stir up election anger and controversy to ensure their candidate wins, think again. Anyone can play that game these days, including your competition. Nike is the expert; they studied the post-Trump American psyche and figured out how to channel all that anger into selling more sneakers.
So what’s to stop you or your competition from doing the same thing? Obviously if you are in the B2B world and the sale of your $1 million widget takes 18 months, stirring up visceral feelings in the general public about your brand probably won’t work. But for many consumer products, and just about all non-profits, generating an emotional response to a product/service or cause will simply be part of the communications strategy.
Chances are some of that response will be generated by bots and clever computer fakery. Witness the recent North Face campaign (see our article “Reputation Killer? The North Face and Leo Burnett Hack Wikipedia”). But that’s today’s reality.
3. Impressions and likes will no longer have value
When controversy and passion become a communications strategy (and it already has, see “Trump” anything) you can’t look to impressions and likes to prove the value. Nike generated a tremendous amount of both of them, but many were from troll farms, less-than-credible news sources, and other non-human forms of reaction.
These days it’s incredibly easy to generate fake outrage, or for a troll farm to jump on your issue. For that reason alone (never mind the dozens of others we’ve described in these pages) measuring the results of your strategy can’t be done by counting impressions or likes or angry emojis. Assessing the value of a campaign can only be done with pre/post surveys, goal conversions, and/or leads or sales data.
4. Your newsroom contact will be an algorithm
Newspapers have been using AI to write sports stories and other news items for years, but they’re now using AI in entirely new ways. Here are a few from The Washington Post:
- Faced with 11,250 political contests in 2020, they realized that there weren’t enough journalists on earth to cover them all. So they brought in the engineers and developed algorithms to speedily analyze local data and help editors prioritize the stories.
- Using the same basic methodology that we in the media analysis business use, they analyzed 9,200 social media posts from Democratic Presidential candidates to determine the top issues.
- Their newsrooms are taking such analysis to new levels, using interactivity to allow readers to explore and engage with the data in fascinating ways.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they also have an algorithm that scans their gazillion in-coming press releases to find the few that might be relevant. ∞
Thanks for the image to Samuel Zeller on Unsplash.
