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Approaching digital

#CIPRSM9 September 2010David Phillips FCIPR

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Why is it important?

• Online public relations and social media is not technology it is evolutionary physiology

• Its about being human• The internet is a thing of human need not digital

development• We love the internet because it satisfies what people

want in life.• It is the temple of human values• PR is its priesthood, social media expertise is its

handmaiden

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Our objectives today

• Perhaps it will help to discover why people like the internet so much.

• We can look at human evolution and psychology.• Understand what drives people to use social media• See why this revolution is about public relations• Recognise the techniques that are common to all

online activity• Translate that into strategies• Examine tactical approaches

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Human evolution and the internet

• We have big brains, a pre-requisite for inventiveness

• Inventiveness , a function of complex language, communication and culture , led to cutting tools, bows and arrows – very complicated technology to make life easier and support the species.

• 38000 years ago the big leap in language development… made us modern man

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The trick is not to wait for the DNA catch-up

• Humans are the only known species to build fires, cook their food, clothe themselves, and use numerous other technologies.

• We speak to each other read and write across the world, across generations and to accumulate knowledge.

• We have evolved so that we don’t need to change our DNA to adopt new survival techniques

• As a result, we are completely dependant on tools and machines for survival.

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Clever, cultured communicative animal

• Having evolved a large and complex brain, our species has a facility to think, imagine, create, and learn from experience that far exceeds that of any other species.

• We have evolved to be dependant on this ability to create technologies, literary and artistic works on a vast scale, and to develop a scientific understanding of ourselves and the world.

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We are ‘hard wired’ to adapt

• The claim that there is an adaptationist explanation for specifically human intelligence rests on two ideas: firstly, that human intelligence is a complex adaptive trait, and secondly, that natural selection is the major source of complex adaptive traits.

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We don’t know everything

• Human intelligence is not a general-purpose capacity for rational thought but is instead a ‘tool box’ consisting of a very large number of task-specific tools, each of which has the evolved function of producing an adaptive response to some specific adaptive problem that our hominid ancestors faced in the Pleistocene.

• How does an African populate the arctic? By being pre-programmed to be adaptive.

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The ‘tool box’ is past to the next generation in books!

• Because many complex skills and behaviors are being passed on through culture, the species has escaped the need to encode them rigidly in its genome. "Of course the mechanisms of selection are operating," says Ajit Varki,

• “We don't necessarily fix our behaviors, and we are letting some previously fixed behaviors deteriorate, because we can rely on cultural transmission", he adds.

• http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090211/full/457776a.html

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We can invent our way out bad mutations

• Gilean McVean: the human ability to learn and adapt has eased the selection pressure .

• A modern example, he points out, might be the ability of humans to make spectacles to counteract poor vision – we have cheated the evolutionary norm of natural selection to weed out the human strain likely to have poor eyesight.

• http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090211/full/457776a.html

• What we have done is to learn how to extend our physiology.• We like to travel (early man evolved to run longer than most other animals

as the means to wear down his prey, to travel to places where adaptive behaviour can flourish and thus we populated most of the world).

• Is it then a surprise we extended our physiology by inventing a bike, train or plane?

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The cumulative effect• Human culture, has the distinctive characteristic that it

accumulates modifications over time (called the ‘ratchet effect’). • This difference results from the facts that

– human social learning is more oriented towards process than product – unique forms of human cooperation lead to active teaching, social

motivations for conformity and normative sanctions against non-conformity.

• Together, these unique processes of social learning and cooperation lead to humans’ unique form of cumulative cultural evolution.

• http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1528/2405.full

• The result: We can ‘evolve faster and fast at an accelerating pace

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What does this mean today

• This gives us a human line that can be more social (using letters, books, telephones , Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter

• We can access more information using the internet – Google is part of the evolution of our mental physiology because it gives us a bigger ‘memory’.

• We can develop more technologies, arts and interfaces (even better than bows and arrows) faster and to serve not just a minority but all people.

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The internet scratches the evolutionary itch

• This human species is programmed to be adaptive and create adaptionist tools.

• This is not for a ‘techie elite’ it is part of what makes everyone of us ‘human.’

• The internet (and social media) is made in the image of mankind, by mankind for mankind

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Why is this important for PR

• PR, being about the spread of values, knowledge and the development of relationships round values and knowledge

• Modern Humans have created the internet which above everything else exposes values and knowledge and opens channels to build relationships

• The internet and social media has evolved to be the symbiotic partner for PR (as long as PR can keep up).

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Lets get comfortable

• The internet is not technology it is the tool of human evolution

• The internet is about being human.• We have evolved to create the internet• The internet is part of our DNA driven

development• That is why peoples like it, use it, develop it and

make it evolve at an ever growing pace so that humans don’t have to wait for our DNA to change.

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OK... So what is PR’s role

1. Take out of the evolution of the internet the things that evolution says is important for human survival

2. Develop the internet to help us deliver what our destiny (our DNA) needs

3. Believe that our profession is EXACTLY designed to do this

4. Get on with it!

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Where have we got to?

• We now know enough about the internet to know what the present level of internet evolution can deliver.

• Lets no longer wonder at the stars and, instead navigate by them.

• Lets look at the strategic and tactical developments that are within our (evolved) and the internet (evolved) capabilities in this generation.

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Priestly Strategies

• We know that there are some strategies we need to consider (because we are human).– Monitor to get a good view of the landscape we

inhabit. Use monitoring as a tool to see the present.– Examine the values of our organisations and the values

of the communities that affect our organisations – Find symbiotic drivers to aid community building and

understanding (which does lead to closer imperatives such as sales, votes, recruitment, vendor relations etc)

... Cont...

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More Priestly Strategies

• Strategies cont...– Look to protect us and ours and have good

defensive strategies (Humanid evolution included defences for everything from disease to psychological responses to threats)

– Re-define the culture of our organisation and its the culture of relationships with publics (Aristotle would be proud)

– Restate strategies into (SMART?) objectives

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Why do we know this is the right way?

• Mostly because it panders to the evolved human

• We have 30 years experience of success and failure in using social media

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The handmaiden’s tactics

• Rules– Be very broad in what you consider– You will follow the crowd and still have space to be

intriguing (e.g. Creative)– Poke around in other people’s territory (web site

building, SEO, widgets, games, search and monitoring etc).

– Look for integration

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Is it Twitter of Facebook?

• Get over it..... It may not be either• Use the best tools to deliver on your strategic

objectives• Mix-n-match – humans are all over the world, are

individual and have many ‘selves’ such as child, mother, sibling, friend, colleague and even mate down the pub....

• Txt is not Twitter and mom may never have a Linkedin profile

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At the end of the day• Now be convinced – this is fundamentally about PR and

how PR represents the Priesthood of Modern Man– Online public relations and social media is not technology it is

evolutionary physiology– Its about being human– The internet is a thing of human need not digital development– We love the internet because it satisfies what people want in

life.– It is the temple of human values– PR is its priesthood, social media expertise is its handmaiden