Will this kill that?

"The archdeacon contemplated the gigantic cathedral for a time in silence, then he sighed and stretched out his right hand towards the printed book lying open on his table and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, and he looked sadly from the book to the church: `Alas,' he said, `this will kill that'" . . .

This was the presentiment that as human ideas changed their form they would change their mode of expression ... that the book of stone, so solid and durable, would give way to the book of paper, which was more solid and durable still."

Great introduction. I wish I'd written it. But I didn't. I picked it up on the World Wide Web. Actually, it was written by Michael Hauben, from the Columbia School of Journalism. A colleague of mine picked it up in Hong Kong and E-mailed it to another colleague in London, who passed it to me. Now, God knows where you may be reading it.

This is a perfect illustration of the radical change that new digital media will bring, are already bringing, into communication. The key proposition here is that traditional institutions -- corporations, advertisers, marketers, "the press" even -- will no tonger be able to control New Media. Trying to control New Media and use them for what we now describe as "advertising," promotion" or "corporate communication" will be just as illusory as trying to control telephone conversations and use them for advertising. In New Media (as Internet-based, online and more generally digital media are now almost universally called), information -- from news to corporate messages to advertising -- does not flow topdown anymore. Organizations cannot distill and "push" that information to their target audience anymore. "Netizens" are free to pull part or none of that information, alter what they receive, talk back, start their own news and counter-advertising, and feed it back to the Web. Bottom-up or lateral, but not top-down. The Athenian democratic ideal of a marketplace of ideas is almost reached. And the repercussions are tremendous for corporate communicators: You cannot "buy media space" anymore.

The first consequence of that proposition is simple: those who will best use New Media for commercial communication will be those who know how to influence a media you CANNOT control -- as opposed to buying your way into a controllable media. Politicians and public relations practitioners spring to mind.

But let us not jump to conclusions.

Will New Media inherit the earth?

Let us first review the present state of the debate on New Media. In the marketing and advertising literature, the debate has been summed up as: "Will New Media Inherit the Earth?" Will they replace current mass media? Or, in simpler terms: "Should I invest a large percentage of my advertising budget in New Media?"

First, the traditionalist view -- against. "TV/newspapers have always been there, always will." This school of thought believes that while New Media may have a role to play in the future, it will be limited to replacing some of the existing "narrowcasting" media -- online brochures instead of paper ones, for instance. Its main arguments:

* practical: The cost/convenience combination of ink on paper is hard to beat; mass media are ubiquitously available whereas projections of Internet penetration are uncertain at best; mass media and advertising agencies have decades of experience in transforming mere information into added-value messages, news or entertainment (so-called "content" -- what an awful word: contained in what?), whereas New Media are absolute beginners; etc.

* philosophical: We've been told that new ideas/media/services were going to change the world so many times before, why should it be different this time. Man is a creature of habit, inertia is the best protector of TV's huge "installed base" of viewers, etc.

* plethoric: Consumers already suffer from data overload. Why would they want to access another million jumbled information sources' (D'Alembert: "Why speak 10 languages if you have nothing, interesting to say?"; Bruce Springsteen: "57 channels and nothin' on").

Second, the progressist view -- for. "In the next millenium, New Media will dethrone existing mass media." Its main arguments:

* creative: Digital media can combine sound, image and text in unlimited ways -- and add interactivity -- and the more creative media have always supplanted preexisting ones (remember when silent movies were supposed to be more "expressive" than talkies?).

* narrowcasted: New Media let advertisers individually tailor the information sent to consumers, thus concluding the logical evolution from mass media to segmented ones, to individualized messages.

* forward-looking: A bet on the future is a safe bet. Historically, the rate of progress has always been underestimated: History is full of myopic extrapolations, from Malthus to the Club of Rome to massive investments in telex machines; Moore's law, which has held true so far, predicts that microprocessor chips double in power and halve their price every 18 months.

This, roughly, is how marketers and advertising practitioners divide at the moment.

The digital revolution: It's qualitative!

But a quite different picture emerges when one peeks outside the small cone of light cast by the trade press. What is debated in white papers from journalism think-tanks and futurologists and -- what else? -- online discussion platforms? Multimedia experts such as Nicholas Negroponte from MIT argue that the shift from analogic to digital media will cause a qualitative revolution. It's not about narrowcasting," they tell us, it's not about adapting your messages to smaller and smaller audiences; it's the reverse! People will decide what they want and compose their own media themselves. Instead of the current inefficient real-time analog broadcasting system (only justified for live Super Bowl games and presidential elections), thousands of hours of digital TV programs will be downloaded in seconds, each with "header" bits identifying their content, so that you -- or your software agent -- can compose your own program. On the Internet, this shift from broadcasting to "broadcatching," from push to pull, is already a reality. It goes further: the information is not only selected and altered by Netizens, it is created by them. Losing faith in traditional media coverage, able to access a public forum previously reserved to those inside the media power structures, Netizens start making news online -- for instance when a tide of angry online comments forced Intel to remanufacture faulty Pentium chips. As online critic Joe Zoes put it (in the alt.internet.media-coverage Usenet newsgroup):

"Your top-down model of journalism allows traditional media to control the debate, and even if you provide opportunity for opposing views, the editor always had the last word. In the [new medial paradigm, not only do you not necessarily have the last word, you no longer control the flow of the debate."

If one cannot even control editorial content anymore, what do you think will happen to cor-porate or marketing messages?

So, What's next?

Based on this assumption -- a shift from controllable to uncontrollable media -- what repercussions can we then envision for marketing and corporate communication? Let us draw some prospective scenarii.

1. Webvertising" in its

current form will wither.

Advertising has got it wrong so far. Currently, advertising agencies -- even so-called high-tech or "cyber" agencies are using the Web very naively, as just another mass medium. They are trying to attract visitors to announcer sites that offer little more than "cool graphics" and electronic marketing fluff, or buy banner ads or links to announcer sites on popular general-interest sites (such as Hotwired).

This amounts to little more than putting electronic billboards on the roadside of the information highway.

It disregards the qualitative difference between the Intemet and traditional media mentioned above: the Internet is not a "background" media on which you buy the right to "hang" your advertising or marketing messages. It also disregards the fact that, as this highway will be traveled faster and faster (as the number of sites, users and the bandwidth increase), there will be less and less time and interest for commercial sites: Netizens will know where they want to go, zoom there, and not get sidetracked on commercial byroads. Software already is available to block out banner ads from Web pages (http://emile.math.ucsb. edu:8000/~boldt/NoShit/), just like special VCRs let you zip past unwanted recorded commercials ("zipping" being the asynchronous equivalent of real-time"). These "roadside" Web will stagnate or disappear in the coming years.

2. Politicians and PR practitioners will best use New Media.

Advertisers and marketers deliver powerful one-way messages, buying their way into the public's needs or wants. Politicians and PR practitioners manage human interaction -- and the Internet is the most massive, protean monument of human interaction ever. Advertising has a built-in "We Talk, You Listen" logic (even direct marketing's claims to "relationship marketing" is built mainly on stimulus-response mechanisms), whereas public relations use communication to manage debate -- steering it towards the desired issues or platforms.

Thus, politicians and PR practitioners will be among those who will find the best, most innovative ways to use the richness of New Media; they have a head start. They won't have to reinvent their trade completely: In the short term, they will start by adapting their existing communication techniques and skills to New Media (note, going back to our introductory remark, that public relations are indeed very successfully using the telephone. media or the "media" of one-on-one interviews). In the longer term, they will be best positioned to invent new modes of communication.

Let us take some examples.

Media relations -- the process of "getting ink" for a client, i.e. of getting the press to endorse and play back messages of interest to the client -- is the granddaddy of public relations and still one of its most powerful tools. The essence of media relations is the ability to launch a message into a public debate sphere (in this case, the press) and have that message take on a life of its own. In spite of all the press agents' claims of "selling" a story to journalists, media relations are essentially a "pull," not a "push" mechanism: you study your audiences and prepare your messages accordingly, to make them as attractive and robust as possible, then you feed them to the press. From that point on, you have little control over what the press will do. This is very similar to what happens on the Web. Thus, short term, adapting media relations techniques to a media such as the Internet is a straightforward process for media relations practitioners. In fact, they are already doing it: They contact journalists via Internet press releases and E-mail as more and more reporters have started covering an "online beat." In the longer term, one can foresee a new branch of media relations where, instead of establishing a dialogue only with journalists, public relations practitioners will also dialogue with news-making Netizens and get them to endorse, propagate and enrich messages of interest to their clients. "New Media Relations," thus, will sometimes bypass "the Media" (Capital M, in the sense of the press corps).

Today, another tool of public relations is grassroots mobilization -- the process of building and mobilizing a constituency to influence a policy-making debate of interest to a company or institution (e.g., smokers against a ban of smoking in the workplace). Tomorrow, one will see that the distinction between grass roots mobilization and the "New Media Relations" described above will sometimes be blurry: One will build constituencies in the process of making news, and vice versa. Don't just write to your congressman, E-mail your fellow Netizens! This is not politics-fiction, it is exactly what happened in Spokane, Wash., when town officials proposed a six percent tax on gross receipts of Internet access providers. That afternoon, thanks to the mobilization efforts of a councilman, the mayor's office and city council were flooded with E-mail and phone calls. Spokane decided to delay the new levy pending further study.

In a totally different register, the internet is already used to extend investor relations (IR) programs to a borderless audience of analysts, media and investors. According to Steve Vincent, manager of technology communications for Burson-Marsteller Thailand:

"Putting IR information on the Web has many advantages. Material posted at the site is immediately available worldwide. Interested parties can get it regardless of the time zone in which they're located. This speed is especially important during a crisis situation, when the Web site can offer news releases or statements as developments occur. An IR Web site also ensures that people get an accurate picture of the company. Everybody who visits the site sees the same information. Making information freely available creates a favorable cor-porate image. Investors will have confidence that they can always monitor and protect their interests."

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Public relations practitioners are rapidly developing new modes of communication for media whose form is new, but whose logic is familiar to them.

3. Brand ambassadors.

In the New Media environment, every brand fan can become an evangelizer, spreading the brand gospel and influencing other consumers, a la Apple.

Thus, one can imagine a shift from the "mass spokespersons" currently used by brands (sponsored athletes and celebrities, experts and professors for health-based products ... ) to a widely distributed network of consumers-ambassadors. This evolution would have several benefits: The shift from a trickle-down opinion-leading process (common in marketing) to a trickle-across opinion-forming process (common in politics) would bring both more credibility to the brand and a Keynesian multiplier effect to the process, each "evangelizing" cycle producing more goodwill than was available at the start of the cycle, just like the circulation of currency in a liberal economy. One can thus conceive that, for marketing-intensive durable goods where peer advice is all-important (cars, hi-fis, computers), a portion of the heavy advertising budget could be redistributed to reward brand ambassadors," for instance through discounts, financing of peripheral club activities, etc. You could achieve a lot of "cyber word-of-mouth" with the several hundred dollars of advertising it takes to sell a car.

4. Survival of the fittest messages -- genetic message

algorithms.

There will be a positive trade-off to not being able to control what happens to one's messages once they are sent into cyberspace: Communicators will be able to experiment with messages and let the new media environment select the "fittest" messages -- never before has such a live, Darwinian media environment existed.

Split-sample message runs, previously limited by cost or logistics constraints, now will be possible on a scale never envisioned before. One also will be able to observe how original messages get altered as they travel across cyberspace and draw rich conclusions. One could even imagine genetic algorithm messages, where competing messages are sent into cyberspace and programmed to periodically recombine themselves using genetic algorithms: strong parent messages eliminating weaker messages and recombining to give birth to an even stronger generation of messages -- strength being, for instance, measured by the persuasiveness of a message (number of people it motivates to act), or by the importance of the debate it generates (number of times it gets played back or developed). Note that the term "message" is used in a very wide sense: it could be marketing messages (promotional offers, brand benefits), advertising messages (competing creative concepts, competing executions), corporate messages (positioning platforms), public affairs or issue management messages (views on a policy-making debate), etc.

5. The lost art of correspondence.

Paradoxically, parallel to the multimedia explosion, the Internet has already revived the lost art of correspondence. We are rediscovering that a word is worth a thousand pictures.

This trend will keep developing in the coming years. Electronic mail offers the intimacy and focus of the written word, combined with the interactivity and instantaneity of the exchange (a combination that was treasured in the messenger-intensive 18th-century society). But it also offers benefits never before available, not even through telephone calls or faxes: the possibility to address many correspondents at a time -- through mailing lists -- or to reach a middle ground between personal and public messages, through electronic bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, and other MUDS (Multi User Domains) and MOOs (Multi-user Object Oriented).

If one is careful to avoid the junk E-mail trap (flooding every electronic mailbox with useless messages that will remain unread anyway), this type of "massively parallel" epistolary communication can open new doors: The CEO's letter to shareholders can become just that, as opposed to a printed statement in an impersonal annual report; internal communication can turn into a two-way process, with every employee able to access the top executive to provide feedback. Why not envision "E-dazibaos," electronic versions of the Chinese free-expression dazibaos, where companies or institutions would encourage public debate of key issues, by providing simultaneously exposure and anonymity on electronic bulletin boards? The possibilities are limitless.

Conclusion: from mass communication to politics

Empowerment of the individual, social interaction, two-way communication -- the above scenarii all point to the same conclusion: New Media will push us to think less and less in traditional terms of mass communication, and more and more in terms of social and political interaction. They will make us shift our perspective from a quantitative to a qualitative one. This, for a professional communicator, will be the key impact of the digital revolution.

It's about time this revolution took place. The logic of traditional commercial communication, such as advertising, was born from that of the industrial revolution: economies of scale. Mass production gave birth to mass media, mass media gave birth to mass communication. This started over a century ago; a lot has changed since. Today, the key "good" being exchanged and used to create added value is information, not steel. Information should not be subject to economies of scale: Its value is qualitative, not quantitative -- three pages of a book or three hours of TV are not worth thrice as much as one. But our physical distribution of information had so far been largely based on economies of scale, because of the analog form of this information. The digital revolution is changing all this. It is bringing a long-overdue logic: Increasingly, the movement of information is ruled by qualitative, not quantitative notions -- reaching one or one thousand persons on the Intemet costs the same, no matter where they are located, and one person can have more impact on your image than a thousand.

The quasi-organic nature of New Media is turning the notion of quantitative headcounts into an obsolete issue: As in politics, process/dialogue will soon be more important than and indistinguishable from result (already, questions are being asked about the measurement of site hits": millions of eyeballs over the world have seen my site -- so what?). Reach, frequency, CPMs are fast becoming less important than the ability to influence and catalyze social dialogue -- from word of mouth and elevator conversations with colleagues to after-dinner exchanges, philosophie de comptoir (barroom philosophy), and public debates.

Those who embrace these notions will best take advantage of New Media, and, like Hugo's archdeacon, will write the best pages of the new "book" that is offered to them. The others will proudly, be stuck with their "book of stone, which today seem so solid and durable. What will it look like tomorrow?

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert (...)

(...) And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Looks on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley)