Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt been reading a lot about the emerging and likely impact of AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology on the way we live and work.
In the communications jungle where I live, the drums have been beating especially loud with some (so-called) experts predicting the complete demise of human involvement in the provision of the services people like me offer. We even had the disclosure, before a parliamentary committee late last year, by one Commonwealth government department that it was already using AI to produce its internal staff communications.
My view is that unquestionably AI is going to change the nature of public relations (PR), communications and marketing – it already is! But there is one element of the work done by an effective PR, marketing or communications practitioner that I would challenge as being difficult to replace.
That is what could be termed: The ability to read the room. By ‘the room’ I mean anything from employees to groups of parents, to the broader community and especially the media.
Although the comparison might be considered unfortunate by some, it is an attribute critically shared by politicians. By nature, human beings are fickle, prone to be easily misguided and too often respond based on emotion rather than logic. And a lot can change with the passage of time.
Students of political history will recall what happened to British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill in the months following the end of WW2. Churchill was widely hailed a hero, the person most responsible for Britain surviving six years of relentless conflict that brought the nation to its knees. And yet, in July 1945, barely two months after Britain and its allies declared victory over Germany, the British electorate unceremoniously booted Churchill out of office. Historians tell us that it was reflective of an underlying wave of public sentiment that had been brewing for some time where people wanted to see greater support from government – effectively what we now know as the Welfare State. And so, out went Churchill and into office went Labour leader, Clement Atlee.
For me, this story is illustrative of the importance of leaders being surrounded by people who are skilled at listening and interpreting evolving community attitudes and perceptions. This has implications for the skillset and experience of the person you may either employ inhouse or retain as an external consultant to advise you on managing the risk of reputational damage due to poor communication.
I should clarify that I regard the notion of ‘reputation management’ as relating to the requirement to minimise the risk that one-off or even relatively minor incidents can blow up into damaging PR disasters – especially in a world where ‘fake news’ rules supreme. This does not imply you can ‘spin your way’ out of a genuine crisis – when bad things happen, they must be confronted, acknowledged and handled with transparency and accountability.
But the increasing trend, especially in a world of sensationalist media and keyboard warriors who blatantly ignore the facts to maliciously cause institutional damage, skilled reputation management has never been more critical.
And that is where a skilled human practitioner, with the ability to keep their finger on the pulse of the public mood and read the subtle changes in the community’s attitudes – no matter how irrational – is irreplaceable.
