Openness as a business strategy extends beyond the ways in which product source code is shared or protected. From a communications standpoint, it means inviting and participating in dynamic discussions with all constituents including customers, partners, investors, employees, developers, analysts and journalists. As with the shift from a proprietary to an open-source model in software, the shift from a controlled, largely unilateral communications approach to one that's open and dynamic creates both opportunities and challenges.

In fact, the current hyperbole in the US with regards to blogging truly misses the overarching point. We are talking about the future of communications in regards to the emerging online ecosystem, or as we refer to this sphere at Text 100, New Publics. Tools such as blogs, RSS, podcasts and wikis are getting the attention, but really what is going on is a fundamental move towards group-discussion-style "communications." As a result, we prefer to call new technologies like blogs "peer media," because they make virtually everyone a publisher and as such a peer in the open conversation of the public.

Balancing chaos and control

In the world of peer media, you can't lock down information flow in and out of the whole company and keep functioning, and you can't open everything up, either. At the one extreme, everyone in your organization would become gatekeepers, and at the other, they'd all become full-time communicators.

The environment of online interactions is much like that of trade shows. While you can't control everything that's said and done about your company by everyone wearing a company shirt, somehow employees manage to give effective product demos to groups of customers and prospects, interact with snooping competitors and chat with passing journalists. And guess what: It works.

In setting company policy for peer media including blogs and other tools, it's vital to understand that communicating outside of official channels does not constitute disloyalty. Allowing employees to interact in an open, unfettered way with the outside world shows confidence and can affect an overall corporate set of messaging in a very positive way.

Peer media is still about "influencers"

Traditional communications is all about touching those influencers and their audiences in regards to the message and issues our clients seek to drive. Getting coverage is the name of the game.

Peer media is the same in that there are influencers in all online communities, and the dialogue that is occurring involves a range of social, political, economic, business and technology issues. However, the influencers to these new publics have built reputations within these communities as respected voices much like journalists and editors, but with a key difference—payroll is not an element here. The expressed views of these influencers and the communities that they affect are not for commercial gain, otherwise this "selling out" gets uncovered by the community and quickly weeded out. Any effective peer media program will need to adapt to this new model in reaching out to those influencers and their communities, i.e., new publics.

Peer media and conventional media feed each other

Peer media entries inspire news stories. An employee-written article in a link-friendly conventional media outlet is an effective way to start a group discussion. And every piece of information a company throws off, from job pages to port scans, is fair game.

Peer media and conventional media can work together to develop an accurate picture of where a company's center of mass is moving, and conventional communications initiatives—based upon a traditional, controlled dialogue between the company and a journalist or analyst—have less and less power to affect that picture. Peer media and conventional media working together develop an integrated picture of a company from all sources.

Adapt to changed rules!

With peer media going mainstream, the order of things in communications has turned upside down. Clay Shirky, a consultant on the social and economic impact of Internet technologies, put it this way: "The conventional media first 'filter, then publish,' the order in peer media is first 'publish, then filter.'" Shirky further explains: "If you go to a dinner party, you don't submit your potential comments to the hosts so that they can tell you which ones are good enough to air before the group,

but this is how broadcast works every day. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a community, by contrast, say what they want to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact."1 What Shirky says is also true for enterprise communications. The focus has been and mostly still is on filtering out the right message in a closed conversation within a small selected group of company stakeholders, then pushing it to a distribution list and sticking to it. This approach was mainly designed to create awareness and was lead by the discipline of advertising, but also provided the role model for large parts of the media relations industry. The peer media community goes the opposite way. It starts open conversations virtually everyone can join. You cannot predict where it begins, and you cannot predict where it ends; the important thing is the process of the discussion and what is contributed. The possible end, a published opinion that gains traction, results from this process. The best you can do is to listen where the conversation goes, get prepared, provide information where requested and join the discussion in an authentic and credible way, then you can exert influence. Instead of "pitching" a "press release" to "get coverage," your aim will be to become an influential part of the conversation.

Understand opportunities and risks

Dealing with the peer media environment is not optional anymore; it is a reality that increasingly affects how the communications industry does business. While the awareness for the phenomenon is increasingly there, most communicators and business owners are still unsure what to do with it. We can describe the current situation in the U.S. using Gartner's hype cycle. Peer media, like blogs, are now at the peak of inflated expectations, but it is likely that this phase of high awareness will be followed by disillusionment soon. Whatever the expectations are, positive or negative, they probably won't come true to the degree expected. What is needed now, both in business and communications, is a phase of education on what the peer media can do and cannot do, followed by a phase of relationship development with the community which will over time build reputation for those who do it well.

Authenticity matters, regardless...

In sum, the value of public relations, whether conventional or peer media, is the level of transparency necessary and thus the inherent need for authenticity in all forms of future communications. Historically advertising has been described as a monologue, the best public relations as a dialogue and now peer media must, of course, be group discussion. If you communicate anything that is not authentic or has apparent spin, the peer review process will instantly reject it and cause you a greater communications crisis than the one you had to begin with. And therein lies the power...

1 Clay Shirky, "Broadcast Institutions, Community Values." First published Sept. 9, 2003, on the Networks, Economics and Culture mailing list. http://www.shirky.com/writings/broadcast_and_community.html