Government the sum of vision, administration and communication

As Australia staggers towards the presumed end of the current Federal Labor Government, two alternative perspectives are worth considering.

The first is the forthcoming US presidential election, which remains a work in progress.

The second is the US presidential election from 1968, in particular, Robert Kennedy’s run for the Democratic nomination. My attention was drawn recently to an extract from comments he made at the University of Kansas in March 1968. It’s a remarkable stump speech, laced with candour, that brings together three things that make up effective government.

These seem to be vision, in the sense of having a context into which policies and programmes might be developed; administration, the process of delivering services to the population; and communication, perhaps something that stirs the population as well as being the essential requirement of actually explaining things.

In that Robert Kennedy was assassinated later that year, we can only speculate about whether his ability to seemingly bring all three together would indeed have happened, and whether it would have been effective.

But without all three, government becomes compromised.

Calling out the state of Australia’s home-grown IT sector

On the eve of CeBIT Australia, the article by Asher Moses in today’s Sydney Morning Herald (“Children of the Revolution”,  http://bit.ly/L5XEFB) provides an insight into why Australia is probably not a tech-savvy country.

It’s worth a read, even if you read this from somewhere other than Australia.

Also today, Australian Federal Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull calls for multinational IT companies to pay more tax in Australia (today’s Australian Financial Review, “Make Google Pay More Tax: Turnbull”, http://bit.ly/JITNDs).

Methinks he misses the point, and the Government, too. Turnbull is quoted in Moses’ article in the Herald as asking people to contact him with policy ideas to boost home-grown IT companies. I doubt calling for larger tax contributions per se sends the right message. The call for appropriate income tax from multinationals is a conversation about appropriate offset tax contributions, something that every IT multinational operating in Australia is well aware of. The ATO is good at working with these organisations to rectify any oversights that need fixing, and everyone moves on.

And Turnbull’s opposition position on the National Broadband Network (NBN), that it’s unnecessarily expensive and unnecessarily over-engineered (I simplify here), doesn’t help.

But I think the point about IT in Australia is more subtle. The industry, and those seeking to make their mark, simply won’t wait for policy to catch up. Unless the opportunities are immediately right for home-grown development, they will go elsewhere (per Moses’ article) and for a number of reasons, not just reasons of investment.

My former employer, software company Altium, is now based in Shanghai for reasons of market opportunity, that opportunity being that China is set to become a world design hub, not just a world manufacturing hub. Why stay in Australia?

And there’s cultural thread running through this argument too, a subtle complacency that allows us to continue to rely on primary and natural resources because they continue to deliver economic growth each year, and perhaps an assumption that we sort of don’t quite deserve to develop successful IT companies here.

But that fundamental economic model is based on driving mining efficiency to an ultimate point of maximum return, and a reliance on contracts with other parties. Once the efficiency has been achieved, there’s nowhere else to go. Once the customers for the ore have had their fill, there’s no-one left to turn to.

IT is unique in requiring just one thing: clever minds. There’s no national barrier that hems such minds in, and there’s no barrier to exporting the products created by these minds. None of the businesses described in Asher Moses’ article relies on much physical infrastructure. And they have chosen to base themselves elsewhere not because of market size (they are all tapping a global market) but the sense that Silicon Valley will support them with finance and that elusive, intangible can-do vibe.

So it’s about the willingness to take risks, the perception of the advantages of one environment (Silicon Valley) over another (Australia) based on the reality that sits underneath.

Those working in IT in Australia just know that it’s easier and quicker and better to develop ideas and businesses somewhere else.

Which is a shame. To those who are building IT businesses here, please stay!

Communicating is not a cost

Communicating with your employees, your customers, your shareholders, your partners, your prospects, the sources of your future human talent, the market at large, with those who can influence the perception of your organisation in the broader market, including media and social media channels, is not a cost.

It’s as much a part of doing business (not just being a business) as issuing invoices and collecting money.

By all means redefine the measures of success. By all means recast your programmes. By all means go to market to test whether you should change your consultancy.

By all means, become better and more succinct at communicating.

But don’t stint. Don’t stop. And don’t cut your communications budget or resources because they look (if you squnit) like a cost.

If all those individuals who make up all those audiences listed above don’t know what you stand for, don’t know what you have to offer, or don’t hear from you, they won’t buy from you.

Create value, and help people find it, by communicating.

The return of interrupting

I’ve just realised that everywhere I turn on the web, I’m interrupted by advertising. From Google itself, including my own email account, to Lego fan blogs, from national Australian newspapers to YouTube, I’m constantly interrupted.

It makes me no more likely to react favourably to what I’ve just seen. It’s still an interruption, and I’m at a given web page for a reason other than the interruption.

Time for clever PR practitioners to create value and help people find it, without the need (or temptation) to interrupt.

Communications and spin and the National Broadband Network

Today’s media talk about the latest progress, messages and political positions linked to Australia’s National Broadband Network. (See Jennifer Hewitt and John McDuling in the Australian Financial Review, 3oth March 2012. Sorry, I’m struggling to find it in The Australian.)

In particular, Hewitt discusses the messages being used by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Minister Stephen Conroy, which distil down to a choice between “broadband” with Labor, or “no broadband” with the Liberal-National opposition.

This strikes me as effective, especially for something as complex (technologically, financially and politically) as the National Broadband Network (NBN). I don’t agree that this is spin, beyond the undoubted fact that it has one particular bias to it, that of the government. But that’s intrinsic and obvious, and the opposition is duty bound to take an alternative position, whatever that may be.

I wonder how far the government might be prepared to go with its messaging, and how many Plays it might want to consider running.

How about messages around creating a 21st century infrastructure to replace an early-mid 20th century copper one, which Calls Out the opposition’s declared preference to re-use existing technology.

How about messages on ease of movement within Australia (such as when moving house) to replace the situation that stills seems common today. The argument that an alternative to a fibre network laid to the home, created from a composite of existing and improved technologies, doesn’t wash because it doesn’t deliver today. We all know of stories about people moving houses or seeking to connect new ones, either to an existing broadband network or to an ADSL service, and waiting weeks to do so. I have a friend who has done just this, who is both disabled and running a business. As I write this, he remains completely cut off from anything other than mobile broadband, despite weeks of planning and negotiating with one of the incumbent telcos in Australia.

This message is a Challenge to those opposing the NBN, perhaps a Bait.

A broadband network (using the indefinite article) to the home (however long it takes to complete) will, in essence, allow users to plug in and go, and go at high speed.

Finally, what about messages about how the (definite article) NBN  is in fact dismantling the status quo and creating a new one for the future? It is understandable that political and commercial interests become concerned at something that breaks new ground. Neither negates the essential benefits to the nation and to us as individuals.

From the perspective of running Plays (see Plays2Run.com for the definitions of the Plays mentioned above), all these force the opposition into taking a reactive stance.

That gives the government the lead in the debate, and leading the debate gives you the advantage.

That’s effective communications.

Communicate with intent

In the space of about five minutes this morning, I read two blog posts that touched on what communications actually means.

The first was the new official definition of public relations from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). That definition, selected by vote after a debate, is “public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” (Read more here.) Fair enough, and as noted elsewhere, a concise summary for those seeking to understand what we do.

The second was the latest blog post from Seth Godin. He talks about customer unhappiness in the context of businesses providing products or services. The solution, he says, ” is pretty simple: address the unhappiness. Change the system or talk about the problem or acknowledge it if that’s all that can be done. None of this can happen, though, unless there’s communication” (my italics).

He goes on to say that much communication (“is everything OK, sir?”) is rote, with little or no genuine intent to act behind it.

It struck me that the most effective communications has intent: not just a sale (or that could be an intent) or even, per the PRSA’s definition, mutual understanding or benefits, but a real, authentic, genuine desire to help the other party move to a new status. That might be understanding, but it might also be a sale, or to assist in employee retention, or gain a vote, or garner support for a cause, or to recruit advocates.

I haven’t thought of public relations as having ‘intent’ in this way. It’s an interesting concept, and I think has a bit more of an edge than ‘mutual understanding or benefits’.

Defining a communications programme with objectives that say “we wish to help this group of individuals understand our perspective, so that they take a certain set of actions” (with these defined) seems to me to be a more complete set of objectives.

How knowledge management and PR collide productively

I recently attended a Knowledge Management Round Table here in Sydney.

The speakers’ case studies were insightful, and while it hadn’t especially occurred to me before, I recognised an affiliation between what I might call public relations and what they do, which is to garner, manage and disseminate knowledge and wisdom, not just facts and data.

As someone at the session noted, there’s a difference between having the facts, and understanding what they mean and what to do with them.