Is Public memory really that short?- The Malaysian Insider
January 12, 2011 — Is APCO Worldwide really worth the money? Good public relations is not just about highlighting achievements and running down the opposition, but also managing crises and negative perceptions. Yet somehow the prevalent PR strategy of the government seems very much like an ostrich in the sand.
Ignore it and it will go away. There is a superficially valid reason for this, of course, grounded in the belief that you and I have a thousand other things on our mind and our short memories and small brains can’t retain too much information.
In many respects, this analysis is correct — we do have a lot on our minds. But there are two critical exceptions: new media and residual memory.
For us to forget, news has to decay. Traditional media follows a news cycle. Simplistically put, when a story breaks, it gets the maximum coverage, which gets progressively smaller as other stories break. The same holds true for television news programming. But when it comes to the online media, one-touch retrievability expands the durability of news remarkably. So our memories can be refreshed instantly.
When combined with the power of social media to create powerful interest groups who can constantly highlight issues of interest to them to a wider community, we have real disruption of the existing media paradigm. Facebook and Twitter enable users to create their own news agenda and disseminate it quickly, and more importantly build on it with new content on the same topic over time.
The Warisan Merdeka issue may have died down, but not in the eyes of the 260,000 Facebook users, for many of whom it was the first time being part of a larger interest group and who will prolong their involvement with it, whether the mainstream media covers it anymore or not.
The other problem with this approach is the fact that long after an issue has died down, there is still a defining residual memory that remains. We may not remember Dolly Parton songs and movies, but we do remember two things about her.
The specifics of the PKR elections will be forgotten fairly quickly, but a year later we will probably still remember “Zaid” or “messy” or “hanky panky” when they are mentioned. When built, Warisan Merdeka will probably bring to mind words like “hubris” or “unnecessary.”
This is why both the ruling party and the opposition need to be on the ball in the area of crisis management. As an example, despite two near crashes recently, Qantas has come out of the crisis reinforcing rather than compromising its reputation for putting safety first. If they had not reacted at all, our residual memory would be of near misses and bad maintenance rather than responsible pilots, excellent training and it’s Rolls Royce’s fault.
The moral of the story is this: Good news builds reputations slowly; unanswered bad news has the power to ruin reputations instantly. The majority of people when faced with issues that they are not partisans for know that there are inevitably two sides to any story and are willing to be convinced.
A refusal to engage by maintaining silence in today’s new media landscape though, creates a perception of admission. The new media will ensure that we remember something, and that something will be one sided. A simple test — which coalition do you think is more corrupt, racist and has enriched its cronies?
Imagine this: An MP is accused of corruption in a telecoms deal, senior journalists are caught on tape allegedly acting as power brokers in getting the MP a ministerial berth, the mainstream media closes ranks to protect its own and kills the story, the online news media picks it up and the protest expands exponentially till the mainstream media is forced to cover the story, and the journalists in question come out looking guilty even though no impropriety has been proven.
If it sounds too far-fetched to be true, get this: This is a story out of India, a country with an Internet penetration rate of less than seven per cent. The lessons for our highly and ever increasingly wired nation are simple. Silence or mere denial is no longer an option, whether it’s politicians, bureaucrats or even journalists who are in the dock.
Remember John Edwards? The guy who denied having an affair while his wife had cancer and then had to admit to it. Yes? So do I. Do you also remember that he was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and a presidential candidate against Obama in the Democratic race in 2008?
I didn’t.
Ignore it and it will go away. There is a superficially valid reason for this, of course, grounded in the belief that you and I have a thousand other things on our mind and our short memories and small brains can’t retain too much information.
In many respects, this analysis is correct — we do have a lot on our minds. But there are two critical exceptions: new media and residual memory.
For us to forget, news has to decay. Traditional media follows a news cycle. Simplistically put, when a story breaks, it gets the maximum coverage, which gets progressively smaller as other stories break. The same holds true for television news programming. But when it comes to the online media, one-touch retrievability expands the durability of news remarkably. So our memories can be refreshed instantly.
When combined with the power of social media to create powerful interest groups who can constantly highlight issues of interest to them to a wider community, we have real disruption of the existing media paradigm. Facebook and Twitter enable users to create their own news agenda and disseminate it quickly, and more importantly build on it with new content on the same topic over time.
The Warisan Merdeka issue may have died down, but not in the eyes of the 260,000 Facebook users, for many of whom it was the first time being part of a larger interest group and who will prolong their involvement with it, whether the mainstream media covers it anymore or not.
The other problem with this approach is the fact that long after an issue has died down, there is still a defining residual memory that remains. We may not remember Dolly Parton songs and movies, but we do remember two things about her.
The specifics of the PKR elections will be forgotten fairly quickly, but a year later we will probably still remember “Zaid” or “messy” or “hanky panky” when they are mentioned. When built, Warisan Merdeka will probably bring to mind words like “hubris” or “unnecessary.”
This is why both the ruling party and the opposition need to be on the ball in the area of crisis management. As an example, despite two near crashes recently, Qantas has come out of the crisis reinforcing rather than compromising its reputation for putting safety first. If they had not reacted at all, our residual memory would be of near misses and bad maintenance rather than responsible pilots, excellent training and it’s Rolls Royce’s fault.
The moral of the story is this: Good news builds reputations slowly; unanswered bad news has the power to ruin reputations instantly. The majority of people when faced with issues that they are not partisans for know that there are inevitably two sides to any story and are willing to be convinced.
A refusal to engage by maintaining silence in today’s new media landscape though, creates a perception of admission. The new media will ensure that we remember something, and that something will be one sided. A simple test — which coalition do you think is more corrupt, racist and has enriched its cronies?
Imagine this: An MP is accused of corruption in a telecoms deal, senior journalists are caught on tape allegedly acting as power brokers in getting the MP a ministerial berth, the mainstream media closes ranks to protect its own and kills the story, the online news media picks it up and the protest expands exponentially till the mainstream media is forced to cover the story, and the journalists in question come out looking guilty even though no impropriety has been proven.
If it sounds too far-fetched to be true, get this: This is a story out of India, a country with an Internet penetration rate of less than seven per cent. The lessons for our highly and ever increasingly wired nation are simple. Silence or mere denial is no longer an option, whether it’s politicians, bureaucrats or even journalists who are in the dock.
Remember John Edwards? The guy who denied having an affair while his wife had cancer and then had to admit to it. Yes? So do I. Do you also remember that he was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and a presidential candidate against Obama in the Democratic race in 2008?
I didn’t.
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