|  Candace Talmadge Read Candace's bio and previous columns
April 20, 2009
Social Media’s Subversion
of the Powers That Be
Online social media are
threatening to dismantle carefully crafted corporate images in much the same
manner that Napster upended the recorded music industry a decade ago.
Despite the megabucks
companies spend on teams of extensively coached spokespersons, the balance
of communications power has shifted. “It’s interesting how social media
changes issues of power and identity,” says Ross Brinkert, assistant
professor of corporate communications at Penn State Abington.
Even the biggest of
businesses are reeling in stunned disbelief. Their messages and corporate
profiles are no longer entirely in their control. Many of them, ironically,
don’t even know yet that this has happened. The savvier companies are active
in social media or at least following the migration, but the rules of the
game have altered.
Social media are
subversive. They put individuals and tiny businesses in a much better –
possibly even superior – position compared with major corporations. Big is
no longer better or more advantageous. Ordinary people go online at Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube or any of their dozens of social media siblings, talk back
to Big Whatever (business, government) and millions of others share in the
exchange.
Now that is a truly
revolutionary proposition. As just one example, national and local media
outlets, already drained of ad revenues by Craigslist and Google, have also
lost their lock on determining what news is and how we interpret and talk
about events. Bloggers and Tweeters have just as much a say in the public
debate these days.
Get used to it. The people
who participate in these online communities are the ones now in the driver’s
seat to a great extent. They set the discussion agenda, framing and
interpreting messages to their liking. “The rules of social media are brand
new,” Brinkert observes. “They are not just extensions of old media.”
This development comes as a
shock to CEOs, or the public relations VPs, and other cloistered C-suite
denizens. The phrase “public relations” is rapidly evolving to mean actual
interactions in real time with real people – something that seems to fill
the majority of executives and celebrities with fear and loathing. Speak
directly to the unwashed masses? Gadzooks! What is the world coming to?
Yes indeed. The
command-and-control, top-down, one-way method of reaching the masses just
doesn’t cut it anymore. Not when take-out pizza chain workers can make an
idiotic video and post it to YouTube, where it is watched by millions,
instantly dealing a huge blow to customers’ trust that company’s product is
safe to consume.
This is precisely how
identities, such as that of employee, are blurred by new media, according to
Brinkert. Before social media existed, the two’s stunts may have been known
to co-workers and possibly their supervisors, but not the rest of the world,
too. With social media, they become instantly notorious.
The consequences of such 15
minutes of fame are not always pleasant. The Domino’s workers in question
have been arrested and charged with contaminating food distributed to the
public. This may make management at Domino’s Pizza feel better, but it
undermines their response to the incident, which was to fire the offenders
and insist that the adulterated ingredients never actually left the store.
(If said fixings never left, then the workers never contaminated food served
to the public. They did make a gross, offensive video using company property
and have lost their jobs as a result. Is there a law against poor taste and
bad judgment?)
Brinkert predicts that
companies will quickly formulate and implement social media policies that
prohibit workers from representing them in any media without explicit
permission. That is perhaps the only area where business will still have any
control. Reining in customers or the public at large is a very different
proposition.
A few more stunts like
Domino’s, however, and we’re certain to hear calls to regulate access to
online social media, or the content of it at any rate. There’s simply too
much money on the line, not to mention stock share prices, to keep allowing
social media to provide a megaphone to anyone with a grudge or even just an
unauthorized opinion.
Such a move would violate
the First Amendment, but past administrations have had no problems shredding
other constitutional protections. If there are enough lobbying dollars
thrown around, someone on Capitol Hill will introduce just such legislation.
Copyright laws, after all,
ultimately defeated Napster. No doubt some legal bomb exists somewhere to
deal with YouTube, Twitter and other pesky innovations that disrupt the
status quo and annoy the powers that be.
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