Last Thursday, Twitter announced it had filed paperwork to begin the IPO process. When it was launched seven years ago, who could have guessed today the microblogging site would have more than 200 million users and a $9 billion valuation? 
In those seven years, Twitter has become a bellwether and harbinger of 21st century communications. Like Twitter, business communications today are fast, relentless and overwhelming, largely driven by technology and the Internet. Like Twitter, they are sometimes suspect yet powerful. They can lack context yet move financial markets. Twitter, like business, can make and break news, and often beats traditional media powerhouses at doing so. Yet, Twitter can be wrong, and facts sometimes don’t matter.
So in the still evolving brave new world of communications, what can businesses learn from Twitter’s ascent to communications game-changer?
It’s safe to say that society and the marketplace are generally skeptical of business leaders, politics, public relations “spin” and sensational advertising. And it’s no wonder. The world in which we live today fosters such skepticism.
Five years ago, financial markets were in a downward spiral to the Great Recession, leading to the highest level of animosity toward financial types in decades. The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. What’s touted as good and positive about health care reform and the Affordable Care Act is denounced as lies, gloom and doom by others. Product recalls are fairly commonplace, including two recent recalls of two well-known Johnson & Johnson products.
Within such an environment, the overarching objective of any public relations strategy must be to tell your Story – Story with a capital S – why your organization exists, why someone would want to work for you, partner with you, buy your products or services or invest in you.
Your Story must be authentic. Authenticity builds trust, which determines the audience’s receptivity to the story, which in turn largely determines the success of business communication.
Your Story must have context and be told by fluent storytellers.
It’s hard to be authentic, contextual and persuasive using only 140 characters.
Finally, the effectiveness of your Story must be regularly and frequently measured to ensure the audience or audiences understand are engaged.
In an age of skepticism marked by a radically and rapidly changing media landscape and empowered consumers, the job of public relations practitioners is to effectively reach those audiences to provide meaningful, compelling and authentic context that drives action. We help our clients demonstrate their leadership in time-tested ways – working with reporters and producers, forming partnerships, writing prose. We do so in new ways – blogging, video and tweeting. And we find new ways to bring the “old” together with the new, such as through inbound marketing, in ways that can quantifiably demonstrate ROI on public relations.
The varied ways an organization can tell its story today should do just that – tell an ongoing, cohesive story, coming together like chapters in a book.
Twitter is the right tool to help some organizations tell their story, just like Facebook or Pinterest can be the right tools for other organizations. And although they’ve helped usher in a new communications paradigm, they are just tools. To earn real ROI on public relations and communications, businesses have to acknowledge and embrace the new realities of today, yet do so in a time-tested way that provides context where otherwise there is little; is authentic and transparent where opacity seems to reign; and connects with the right people, who are inundated with hyperbole and hype. That way is through story.
Otherwise, your communications effort will be much like a 140-character tweet: a blip on the screen that within minutes is buried, soon to be forgotten and likely never to be read or seen again.
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Jason Snyder is a senior vice president for WordWrite Communications.
