The world has changed since the dominant “Excellence model” of public relations emerged more than two decades ago. Does our use of social media and related information technologies require a new model?

A model is a thing used as an example to follow or imitate, a simplified description of a system or process. At least that's how the Oxford English Dictionary describes it.

I want to describe a new way of looking at the world of public relations, and practising it; a new model prompted by the continuing developments in social media and related technologies, and their widespread adoption.

In “Real-time Public Relations”, Chapter 17 of this book's predecessor, Share This, I concluded that “the real-time social Web leads us, then, to the Excellence model of public relations: Grunig's fourth model of two-way, symmetrical communication fostering mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics”.²⁵⁶

So is that it? Is the fourth model sufficient? I think not, but a chapter on real-time PR wasn't the place to go on to debate the merits of a new model. This chapter is.

Grunig's 4th

The two-way symmetrical model of PR, James Grunig's fourth model, “uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and its stakeholders”.²⁵⁷

This description shares much in common with my definition of PR: the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill.²⁵⁸

Despite the similarity, my definition avoids two words: communication and public. It does so to focus on the outcome of the profession rather than presume to scope the methods employed, and I hope you'll agree this turns out to be more than semantics as we crack on with that new model.

Let's construct a model, carte blanche. Can we describe the situation we find ourselves in without falling back too heavily on old verbs rammed with preconceptions?

Some definitions

Let's start with some nouns and brief definitions. First we have “organization” as there isn't much sense to this topic without it, and then descriptions of parties that surround it:

• Organization – an organized group of people with a particular purpose.
• Stakeholder – a person or organization with an interest or concern in our organization or something our organization is involved in.
• Competitor – an organization with objectives that clash with our own either directly (e.g. fly with us not them) or indirectly (e.g. don't fly, video conference instead).

Taking a step down into “stakeholder” we find the normal array:

• Customer – a person or organization that buys goods or services (where “buys” includes paying with one's attention or time, and includes “consumer”).
• Prospect – a person or organization regarded as a potential customer.
• Client – a person or organization under the care of another.
• Partner – a person or company of importance to an organization in achieving its objectives.
• Citizen – a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth with rightful interest or concern in the workings of that nation or state.
• Employee – a person employed for wages or salary (taken to include their dependants, and also retired employees still financially reliant upon the organization's ongoing success).
• Shareholder – an owner of shares in a for-profit organization (taken to include those with other financial holdings or investments contingent upon the organization's financial success).

We'll assume that some citizens represent the environment and non-human sentient beings by proxy.

You might say that the definition of stakeholder here could include competitors, but we'll adopt the common distinction between the two.

No organization is an island. Rather, it must interact with all those parties around it in order to pursue and achieve its objectives, and the nature of its interactions is or should be defined and governed by its motivation and objectives and the strategies formed to achieve its objectives.

Mapping the interactions

Now we can begin to map out the interactions, defined as:

We have four primary types of interactions:

I refer to these as primary interactions because one could also look at the interaction between an organization and its competitors in, for example, so-called coopetition (cooperative competition), or trade association activities. One could also look at the interactions of its stakeholders with the competition's stakeholders, such as those between football fans of opposing teams. I found, however, that, while these may be important interactions, they didn't have a material impact on this rethink.

Mapping the influence flows

We can break down interaction (reciprocal action) into action one way and action the other way. Or indeed the influence one way and the influence the other way, where the verb influence is defined as:

In other words, you have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn't otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn't otherwise have done.

This gives us six primary influence flows:

Figure 29.1 shows these flows. For simplicity, I have lumped all stakeholders in the middle but of course our organization and our competitors may not share a universal set of stakeholders.

Figure 29.1: The six influence flows

Moreover, an organization is just a collection of stakeholders, but an organization can persist beyond the lifespan of any group of individuals and is generally considered to have its own identity. Actually, perhaps most pertinently, a diagram consisting of nothing more than a load of little circles representing a bunch of individual stakeholders isn't quite so useful in communicating the model!

It's probably too simplistic but not too far off the mark to consider the historic focus of marketing and PR practice as being predominantly on the first influence flow (our influence with our stakeholders), with a bit of the third in the form of the internal circulation of news clippings for example, and eliciting information with marketing research to improve one's understanding of consumer preferences, attitudes, and behaviours (as long as you systematically ensure that these have an influence).

Sometimes we also try to infer a third flow (our stakeholders' influence with us) from implicit data such as sales volume or growth – “it's not selling as fast as we'd expected, there must be something they don't like.”

Should a competitor have great success with its first flow (the competitor's first flow is our fourth) then one might conduct some ad hoc research to find out how it acted upon stakeholders.

This traditional emphasis was probably down to a combination of what appeared to work at the time, what was expected at the time, and what was possible within the systematic and budget constraints of your typical marketing and PR operation.

Social business

This model is part and parcel of social business, or at least it is if you define social business as I do:

A new model of PR?

So is the Six Influence Flows a new public relations model, and is this the new vista of the public relations professional? Or will the focus of public relations remain on communicating directly with publics, on the 1st and 3rd flows, leaving the wider picture to a new breed of “influence professional”?

Biography

Philip Sheldrake (@sheldrake) is the author of The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age, John Wiley & Sons, 2011, and chapters of the CIM's The Marketing Century, John Wiley & Sons, 2011, and the CIPR's Share This, John Wiley & Sons, 2012. His ebook Attenzi – A Social Business Story was published May 2013 at attenzi.com. He is a Chartered Engineer, Managing Partner of Euler Partners and Board Director of Intellect. He co-founded the CIPR Social Media Panel and advises the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC). He blogs at philipsheldrake.com.