Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Use of Collective Intelligence in Public Relations


The idea of combining all the intelligence from people all over the planet is potentially both a blessing and a curse for public relations. Like all weapons of great power, it must be wielded with care and precision, otherwise practitioners could end up impaled on their own sword and left to clean up the mess. This blog will define the idea of collective intelligence, discuss the potential benefits and dangers of companies opening up their organisations to the world and the effects this can have on public relations practitioners and finally, the tools that collective intelligence has handed public relations to use for networking.

Collective Intelligence can be defined as a mass collaboration of many individuals. French media scholar Pierre Lévy, who introduced the concept in his 1994 book ‘L’intelligence Collective’, coined the term.  The idea simply states that by making information accessible to communities, which is added to by other users, greatly increases the collective intelligence of the group. A key example of collective intelligence is Wikipedia.org, a “free, web-based collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project” (Wikipedia, 2010). Wikipedia is entirely made up of collective intelligence, meaning all of its content is written collaboratively by volunteers around the world.

So what does collective intelligence mean for Public Relations?

The use of collective intelligence by organisations can mean the company needs to allow people exterior to the business into the decision making process.
The judgment of whether to allow outsiders into the process is a difficult one that must be considered by people from all facets of the organisation, particularly legal and public relations, before being made.

Eric Bonabeau states that the dangers associated with allowing these people into the organisation can lead to a public relations nightmare. “The choice to expand your decision-maker set beyond the walls of your organisation should not be made lightly. Not only will you be disclosing information about your organisation to the external world, you’ll also be providing a forum for outsiders who might not always have your best interests at heart.” (Bonabeau, 2009, p. 1). If the worst occurs, it can open a Pandora’s Box of problems, which can be difficult for the company to recover from. “If the collective veers in an unexpected and potentially harmful direction, the resulting damage could be difficult (and costly) to contain.” (Bonabeau, 2009, p. 1).

However, the use of collective intelligence can be very beneficial to companies, but used with caution. With the correct execution, the use of collective intelligence can lead to considerably enhanced knowledge which can assist the organisation with its decision making processes.  But consultation with internal public relations and legal representatives is a must; to ensure all private company information is kept concealed.



Collective intelligence does have a large benefit for public relations practitioners, who above all, pride themselves on being skilled communicators and networkers. The world of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia and blogs – which are all based in collective intelligence – have changed the face of public relations by creating vast networks that, prior to the Internet, practitioners couldn’t have dreamed of.

Jason Falls, founder and editor of Social Media Explorer, states that social media is the public relations of the online world. “Divide the category up by component – blogs, social networks, microblogging, podcasts/Web TV, wikis/collaborative software – they each ladder in some way to a component of public relations – writing, corporate communications, community relations, media relations, event management.” (Falls, 2008, p.1).

Falls hypothesises that eventually social media will “evolve into components of sophisticated public relations effort” (2008, p.1). By ensuring public relations practitioners are ready to accept the responsibility of social media, they will effectively turn collective intelligence into what could be called the greatest networking tool of this generation. 



As previously stated, collective intelligence can be used for public relations with enormous benefits for the industry and their clients, but caution must be exercised. When inviting outsiders into an organisation, they may not always have the organisations best interests at heart, which can be to the detriment of the company (and usually the public relations practitioners job to clean up). However, when used correctly, the potential benefits promise to revolutionise the profession for both practitioners and clients.


References

Bonabeau, E. (2009). Decisions 2.0: The power of collective intelligence. Retrieved
Falls, J. (2008). Social media is the responsibility of public relations. Retrieved 10/26, 2010, from http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2008/07/18/social-media-is-the-responsibility-of-public-relations/


Wikipedia (2010) Retrieved 10/26, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia



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