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Saturday, January 28, 2006
The revolution will be reproduced 
| | Rex Hammock points to Richard Edelman's Me2 Revolution, and says I am requiring all of my employees to read it. I am encouraging all of my clients to read it. You should read it also. Mr. Edelman is president and CEO of the world's largest independent public relations firm with 1,800 employees in 40 offices worldwide, and adds, In the essay, Mr. Edleman channels Doc Searls, so for the Cluetrain crowd, it will sound very familiar. But that's fine, because there are lots of people out there in business-land who have the title "director of corporate communications" and "director of marketing" and "CEO" who will listen to what Mr. Edelman says who may never listen to Doc... |
| | Credit where due: Richard is channeling reality. He's listening to what Chris Locke called networked markets and he's calling for PR to participate in what David Weinberger began began calling the hyperlinked organization long before David loaded that meme onto the Cluetrain. Richard is also respecting facts about markets and customers that Jerry Michalski was talking and writing about, long before Jerry said a consumer was "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash" (also quoted in Cluetrain). He's seeing what Peter Drucker called "The New Pluralism", granting full respect to what Drucker first called "knowledge workers", and heeding Drucker's advice to rely on the expertise of employees. He's respecting what Dave Winer says about users becoming manufacturers while manufacturers become users. Also what Dave said here about how It's easier to *be* a user and make products for other users. That product can be anything, including information about what a company and its products do: the stuff we call PR. |
| | In the past five years, this pyramid-of influence model has been gradually supplanted by a peer-to-peer, horizontal discussion among multiple stakeholders. The employee is the new credible source for information about a company, giving insight from the front lines. The consumer has become a co-creator, demanding transparency on decisions from sourcing to new-product positioning |
| | — he's calling attention to fulfilled prophesies David Isenberg made in Rise of the Stupid Network, in May 1997 — almost two years before Cluetrain went up on the Web and three years before the book came out. The Stupid Network, Dr. Isenberg said, was the Internet, which was designed as a leverage system for the vast and growing intelligence gathered on its exterior. Specifically, |
| | Whatever we discover to be the new Stupid Network value proposition, my working hypothesis is that it will be based on intelligent end user devices, intelligent customers, employees whose intelligence is valued as a corporate asset, and companies that can learn. |
| | Richard and his eponymous agency deserve credit not just for getting the clues, but for building the trains. Notably the Edelman Trust Barometer, which is the primary source for Richard's essay: |
| | The most profound finding of the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer is that in six of the 11 countries surveyed, the "person like yourself or your peer" is seen as the most credible spokesperson about a company and among the top three spokespeople in every country surveyed. This has advanced steadily over the past three years. |
| | In the US, for example, the "person like yourself or your peer" was only trusted by 22% of respondents as recently as 2003, while in this year's study, 68% of respondents said they trusted a peer. Contrast that to the CEO, who ranks in the bottom half of credible sources in all countries, at 28% trust in the US, near the level of lawyers and legislators. In China, the "person like yourself or your peer" is trusted by 54% of respondents, compared to the next highest spokesperson, a doctor, at 43%. |
| | Meanwhile, "friends and family" and "colleagues" rank as two of the three most credible sources for information about a company, just behind articles in business magazines. Again, in the US, the "colleagues" number has jumped from 38% in 2003 to 56% in 2006. We facilitated the revolt by employees of Morgan Stanley against top management, soliciting opinions through their futureofms.com website, which then led to stories in traditional media. |
| | Why the change, with increased reliance on those you know? The Edelman Trust Barometer shows clearly the deep trust void facing traditional institutions including business, government, and the media. |
| | That void comes with a shift in trust from institutions to individuals. Rather than lament this shift, Richard wisely recommends moving PR responsibilities from departments and agencies to the individuals who are in the best position to carry the load anyway (and in many cases already are). This is the PR version of what Terry Heaton calls The Unbundled Awakening. |
| | What Richard also sees, though he doesn't quite say it, is that speaking — being a spokesperson — is about production, not consumption. Scoble isn't consuming Microsoft's PR. Or even redistributing it from Waggoner Edstrom (Microsoft's PR agency). He's producing his own. Thus the Me2 revolution is about new forms of production. It's also one more way employees enjoy a breed of responsibility — speaking for the company — from which in the past they were excluded. |
| | Thus the scope of "consumer" continues to shrink. Soon it will refer only to the population this IBM study calls "massive passives". As we see in this Terry Heaton post, IBM, like Edelman, not only gets it, but gives it too. |
| | Next step for both companies is to recognize that "consumer" is meaningful only as a label for the massive passive population, and giving full credit as producers to all participating employees, customers and individual sources of "content", which now run in the many millions. (If you count bloggers alone. Add musicians, photographers, video artists and gadget hackers and you've see a massive producerist revolution going on). |
| | The final step is recognizing that all these producers, and reproducers, are independent. Orginizations will increasingly exist, and persist, at the grace of increasingly empowered individual producers of good work, good ideas, good services and good products. |
| | Bonus event: Esther Dyson's PC Forum, which runs form March 12-14 in Carlsbad, CA. The theme: Erosion of Power: Users in Charge. |
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