The dogma in Comm/PR programs is that since corporate engagement now is a conversation – with social media being merely a contingent albeit stark materialization of that dynamic – corporate Communication departments will soon be recognized as indispensable. There are a bunch of implicit sociological and epistemological arguments behind the argument, but the basic strain is that marketers are trained to exercise total control over branding and messaging. Either by virtue of analytical method or ingrained training, they simply can’t “let go” enough to be effective in a new media landscape.
Social media is a natural extension of both marketing and public relations. We’ve written extensively about the use of social media across both disciplines and the impact social media or social elements can have on an overall campaign. In its November 2009 report on Social Media and Online PR, Econsultancy found that of the companies surveyed, 35% of companies managed their social media resources under the digital marketing team. PR/communications departments managed 21% of respondents, with 19% saying that social media was managed by a cross-functional team…
As many larger organizations are finding out, it is becoming necessary to create a social media policy — not just for official company communication, but for personal communication by employees (who make it clear they work for the company in their profile). Having a departmental ownership can help guide those policies. Depending on the context of the communications, there may be some accounting and reporting procedures that are legally mandated by the SEC and that might fall under the purview of corporate communications or human relations.
The obvious pushback from a Comm/PR point of view is that marketing is starting out with a huge advantage in laying claim to social media and new communications technologies. Marketing departments are bigger and have more institutional credibility, so whenever they have a colorable claim they win. As their claim becomes more and more untenable – as they fail – they’ll lose control over new communications technologies. Fair enough. That’s an empirical question which, presumably, will be answered shortly.
But the question of why a department would want social media might not be as straightforward as it first appears. Or at least, the initial answer might not be totally exhaustive. Obviously the naive read at least has some truth to it: it’s an institutional battle over resources, where (a) department want to be the ones doing new stuff since then we get more resources to do it, we get to hire more of our own people, etc and (b) departments especially want to be the ones doing the hot new stuff, since they’ll eventually be able to claim that many more resources. We’re hardly in the domain of ontology here.
But it’s not just that claiming new technologies allows a department to do more stuff, and then to demand more resources for doing that stuff. When new technologies are involved, and especially where social media is in play, the competition is over who will be in a better position during future institutional battles. There’s lots of ways to illustrate the central dynamic – just organizational communication can unpack it in different ways – but using Foucault is a pretty short way to get to the end.
This will be an insistence, then, on the utility of Foucault for analyzing and anticipating institutional argument. It’s certainly not that all argument is amenable to Foucauldian analysis. For instance there’s no real reason to examine “give us more resources so we can make more money for the company” through a Foucauldian lens. In a trivial sense it’s probably about power – assuming you make certain basic nominalist gambles as a shortcut for flattening the discourse – but there’s nothing it adds toward understanding the persuasive suasion that the argument holds.
But there are other kinds of institutional arguments that are firmly within the Foucauldian horizon: descriptions are objectively asserted as problems, and implicitly as problems of a particular sort. These frames are rarely institutionally innocent. Decisions are still made through a combination of epistemic tenability, institutional memory, institutional inertia, and power dynamics. The final winner may have been epistemically justified. But it is to insist that they may have won for reasons that had nothing to do with being right.
It’s pretty easy to imagine how this plays out out in the context of foreign policy tussles. In a basic sense, the State Department and the Pentagon argue over whether international crises are amenable to diplomatic solutions. The State Department insists that they are because, if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be much their employees to do. The inverse holds for the Pentagon. On a more subtle level this is a debate over framing: a problem “out there” is not just one that can be solved by diplomacy but it’s a problem of diplomacy. The public diplomacy community in Communication plays this game particularly well by spinning even tangential controversies into matters of “winning hearts and minds.” Geopolitical tension? Hearts and minds. Lack of tourism? Hearts and minds. Etc. That isn’t to say they’re wrong. It’s just to say that their descriptions – like those of almost all bureaucratic actors – aren’t innocent.
But here we’re still in the domain of orthodox Foucauldian deconstruction. A controversy that has a predetermined but muted solution is “discovered” within the context of an institution that frames it as a particular kind of problem. Nothing particularly magical.
Now things get a little bit convoluted in the context of new communications technologies and social media. First there’s the idea that claiming any technology sets up a department for future expansion. Most simply, if Comm/PR departments get to claim social media, then all future controversies that might be tenably be presented as problems of social media get to be problems for social media – and moved into the Comm/PR department. Which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be there. But if we discover that they shouldn’t be there, then the deconstruction becomes fairly easy to trace.
But social media isn’t just another kind of technology in the corporate world, where adoption and subsequent deployment is usually circumscribed by institutional memory and some measure of consensus. Social media have enormous institutional cache and few people in traditional industries can really explain why. That indeterminacy isn’t just a function of its newness either. It’s also a result of how social media achieved institutional legitimacy. The idea that Facebook and Twitter are magical didn’t enter corporate culture in the same way that, say, a new design process would enter a car factory, after months of spreadsheets and cost/benefit analyses.
They were adopted in a rush, where no one wanted to get left behind by the hot new thing. It was a bubble of sorts, where the risk calculation flips and not being right is worse than being wrong. Often the adoption of a particular platform can be traced to boardrooms where 30-something MBA consultants where legitimating themselves as out in front of the hot new thing, but insisting that companies needed to adopt it because it was the hot new thing (“corporate social media experts…”)
So you’ve got a situation where departments aren’t just fighting over regular new technology. They’re not even fighting over regular but particularly promising new technology. They’re fighting over a promising new technology that, because no one’s really sure why it was originally adopted – which is to say, under what conditions it is or was ever useful – can be spun as a solution to anything.
That’s how you get Facebook applications being written for online travel agencies, which – as I posted on the travel blog I write for – is kind of dumb.
It’s an institutional weapon that can be wielded in any battle. Employees are unhappy? Link them together through an internal friend network. Customers are unhappy? Hire a full-time Twitter and Facebook writer. Internal blogs. External blogs. Etc. Which – again – isn’t to say that those aren’t tenable solutions to genuine problems. But it is to insist that the stakes in the battle over social media, being fought between Comm/PR departments and Marketing departments, are far from transparent.
References:
* Which Department Owns Social Media? [Mashable]
* No Orbitz, You Didn’t Need To Develop That Facebook Application [Jaunted]
Related Icon Index Symbol Categories:
* Michel Foucault
* Critical Theory
* Communication
