As we noted in the introduction, content campaigns represent one of several possible communications triads, which comprise emergent technologies, skills and methods. We’ve discussed many new capabilities that you and your team can master – hyper-personalization, social triggers, journey maps, paid promotion, Agile methods and more. Mastering these will enable your organization not only to shape perception but to build the beliefs that culminate in action.
As to building relationships, content-based journey maps may not necessarily apply directly. Try drawing up a list of the 20 people most important to your firm’s future – from the CEO to a key beat reporter – and see whether you agree that content campaigns are not what matters most in forging and maintaining those relationships. And yet, even these intimate and high-value relationships can be improved by the savvy deployment of CommTech tools and methods. For example, keeping track of our interactions with an Influencer Management tool can add depth to our memory about what matters most to them and improve mutual trust.
That word – trust – is important. In a world of proliferating stakeholders, increasingly complex economic and social systems and the weaponization of technology and data, trust is becoming an ever more precious commodity. The technologies meant to connect the world and improve our understanding of it – the internet, social media, and improved data and system intelligence – have often been turned on their heads by malicious actors, negligent proprietors and winner-take-all market dynamics.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Our profession can lead the way if we are attuned to both the benefits and perils of personalization, the threat of benign neglect, the insidious partiality of algorithmic bias, the dynamics of information bubbles and the simple carelessness of unwittingly revealing private information to customers.
Among our responsibilities is to become experts in the use of promising new technologies. For example, one bright light may be the blockchain’s ability to create a public ledger of who created a particular piece of content. Could this be the antidote to deepfakes and other forms of malicious content? Take a look here. Comms teams will have to understand when the tipping point of this technology arrives, possess the skills to use it, and understand how to integrate it into their habits, working rituals and team culture. The same applies to virtual/augmented reality, AI-driven chats and other interactions, and other emergent, disruptive capabilities. Each will require thinking about the Triad of technology, skills and methods.
This isn’t just a matter of theory or even behavior; it’s also a matter of money. What percentage of your budget goes to CommTech today? A veritable army of SaaS vendors is clambering to get “just a moment of your time.” Will you give it to them? On what basis will you make decisions about acquiring new tools, upgrading existing systems or building your own solutions with internal resources? Using the frame of the CommTech Triad, does a new tool represent a technology whose time has come? Do you have the skills to deploy it? And is your team open to new methods of working?
Even more practically, what percentage of your team’s time is wasted contending with complexity? One exercise is simply to ask a representative sample of your team to list every tool they use throughout a single day – no matter how trivial – from email to spreadsheets to social media management tools to web-based graphics generators. You may be surprised by the innovative diversity of approaches your team has devised (or depressed by the kludge of workarounds with which they contend each day). Either way, you will likely find that you are sitting on a CommTech stack already. The question now is whether it’s working for you – or are you working for it?
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