Your PR Campaign is Too Short

Your PR cam­paign is prob­ably too short.

Many organ­isa­tions under­es­tim­ate how long it takes for cor­por­ate mes­saging to propag­ate through a population.

Information has many oppor­tun­it­ies to spread fast and wide through­out online social net­works, but the revolu­tion of algorithms has less to do with speed and breadth than many of us think.

Here we go:

The Glory Days of Mass Media

As mass media estab­lished dom­in­ance in the lat­ter half of the 20^th cen­tury, edit­or­i­al pub­lish­ing was always a weak busi­ness mod­el. To mit­ig­ate this weak­ness, the mass media had to rely on vari­ous forms of advert­ising to enable their edit­or­i­al efforts.

There’s an inher­ent com­plex­ity to this rela­tion­ship. The mass media audi­ence wasn’t keen on pay­ing enough money for edit­or­i­al con­tent. Instead, they paid with anoth­er valu­able form of com­pens­a­tion — their attention.

Of course, edit­or­i­al out­lets had to trans­form the immense value of mass atten­tion some­how. And there was no short­age of spe­cial interests ready to pay for a slice of all that attention:

An organ­isa­tion, starved of atten­tion, trust, and loy­alty, is com­pelled to wage a per­petu­al struggle for its con­tin­ued existence.

So, the audi­ence pays for con­tent with their atten­tion, advert­isers pay for atten­tion with their money, and the edit­or­i­al out­let pays their staff with ad revenue.

In its not-so-mod­est Madison Avenue begin­nings, advert­ising had con­sid­er­able strengths as a busi­ness mod­el. Given the nature of mass media, huge audi­ences could be reached at any one time. It’s also reas­on­able to argue that tra­di­tion­al advert­ising had more prom­in­ent effects on the audi­ence back then.

It was a great time to advert­ise.
And PR was allowed to piggyback.

But noth­ing lasts forever.

The Advent of Network Propagation

Now, most of us have some sense of how events unfol­ded. With the advent of the digit­al era, our media land­scape under­went a fun­da­ment­al trans­form­a­tion. Anyone stuck in tra­di­tion­al busi­ness mod­els depend­ent on mass media is still strug­gling to find the right way to nego­ti­ate our many new online realities.

In this art­icle, I’d like to dir­ect your atten­tion to such a spe­cif­ic change — net­work propagation.

The basic com­mu­nic­a­tion mod­el describes a) the sender, b) the sig­nal, c) the medi­um, and d) the receiv­er. The idea of a con­sid­er­able time dis­place­ment between when the sig­nal is sent and received is not nov­el; many books are read even mil­len­nia after they were first cre­ated. But this dis­place­ment has rarely been a con­sid­er­able consideration.

For a long time through­out human his­tory, the time it has taken for sig­nals to propag­ate through­out a pop­u­la­tion has expo­nen­tially decreased due to ever more effi­cient means of medi­ation, from cave paint­ings and word-of-mouth by the camp­fire to glob­al mass media conglomerates.

The Power of Signal Propagation Delay

But this is where it gets com­plic­ated. With the inter­net, sig­nals were able to propag­ate faster than ever before. And any­one, not just mass media con­glom­er­ates, could sud­denly reach glob­al audi­ences at light speeds. But at this point, some­thing had to give.

Our men­tal band­width as humans is remark­able, but not without its lim­its. Also, our brains haven’t exactly evolved in tan­dem with our means of mediation.

Although rarely dis­cussed in such terms, the solu­tion to the prob­lem of lim­ited men­tal band­width and the explo­sion of avail­able sig­nals was noth­ing short of a revolu­tion. Human gate­keep­ers were replaced with algorithms. For whatever reas­on, mass media con­glom­er­ates refused to imple­ment algorithms, leav­ing the play­ing field open to algorithm-driv­en tech giants like Google (now Alphabet) and Facebook (now Meta).

But this is also where the time dis­place­ment between sent and received stopped propagat­ing expo­nen­tially. Instead, sig­nal propaga­tion rever­ted to a time of cave paint­ings and word-of-mouth by the campfire.

In crude terms, gate­keep­ers had the power to sort mes­sages but lacked the tech­no­logy to send sig­nals at points in time determ­ined by receiv­ers indi­vidu­ally. The mar­vel of algorithms is, con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, not their abil­ity to sort sig­nals. Their revolu­tion­ary prowess stems from their abil­ity to delay mes­sages through­out social graphs. ¹Signal propaga­tion delay. (2023, April 13). In Wikipedia. https://​en​.wiki​pe​dia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​S​i​g​n​a​l​_​p​r​o​p​a​g​a​t​i​o​n​_​d​e​lay

Propagating Faster — and Slower

For a long time, sig­nals were con­tinu­ously spread­ing faster to lar­ger audi­ences. At the algorithmic break, sig­nals have learnt to wait patiently at nodes in a net­work before mov­ing along. Today, sig­nals can some­times move fast, some­times slow — and pass vari­ous socially con­struc­ted fil­ters, allow­ing an often uncanny tar­get­ing precision.

Even the algorithms them­selves have under­gone vari­ous evol­u­tions (such as the silent shift). But their net­worked nature estab­lishes new rules for suc­cess­fully propagat­ing tar­geted signals.

What does the time dis­place­ment of net­work propaga­tion mean for pub­lic rela­tions and mar­ket­ing? Well, for one thing — your cam­paigns are prob­ably too short today.

It’s a non-sequit­ur to say that sig­nals must propag­ate faster or slower today. A more pre­cise way of think­ing of net­work propaga­tion through online social net­works of algorithms is to real­ise that sig­nals are get­ting more effi­cient at tak­ing the time they need to propag­ate.

A Humility Check for Your PR Campaign

For cor­por­ate com­mu­nic­a­tions and mar­ket­ing, this should be a humil­ity check. A press release or an ad might be sig­ni­fic­ant to a spe­cif­ic audi­ence. In a wired world, such sig­nals stand a good chance of reach­ing their recip­i­ents even­tu­ally. How long this takes will be dic­tated by indi­vidu­al needs that might not fit with ambi­tious cor­por­ate timelines.

The out­come is straightforward:

Most PR cam­paigns today are way too short. They’re cre­ated based on the sender­’s needs in a media land­scape where propaga­tion is entirely dic­tated by the recip­i­ents’ needs.

Yes, the inter­net is “fast.” But rela­tion­ships take time to build. It takes time to shift per­cep­tions. Individual audi­ence mem­bers will only pro­cess your cor­por­ate mes­saging if or when they need them. And our brains have lim­ited bandwidths.

Brands must be patient and have the struc­tur­al forti­tude to stay con­sist­ent for their PR mes­saging to propag­ate prop­erly and thor­oughly before jump­ing onto the next PR campaign.

Don’t go for a huge splash tomor­row.
Go for over-the-top rel­ev­ancy day-in and day-out.

The Silent Switch

All social media algorithms are built dif­fer­ently and are con­stantly being developed. At the same time, social media users’ beha­viours are evolving.

Still, there was a way that social media algorithms used to behave—and there is a way that social media algorithms behave now.

This has been a fun­da­ment­al but silent switch.

How Social Media Algorithms Used To Behave

For more than a dec­ade, social media algorithms would deliv­er organ­ic reach accord­ing to a dis­tri­bu­tion that looked some­thing like this:

This dis­tri­bu­tion of organ­ic reach enabled organ­isa­tions to use social media des­pite not being “media companies.”

How Social Media Algorithms Behave Today

Today, after the silent shift, social media algorithms deliv­er organ­ic reach more like this:

The increased com­pet­i­tion and soph­ist­ic­a­tion among con­tent cre­at­ors par­tially explain this new type of dis­tri­bu­tion. However, going vir­al is still just as pos­sible for anyone.

How does this work?

The Single Content Algorithm

How can a social net­work pre­dict what users will like? 

Content from a trus­ted cre­at­or trus­ted by a large com­munity of fol­low­ers used to be the lead­ing indic­at­or of future per­form­ance. But today, social net­works have found a bet­ter way to pre­dict con­tent success.

The single con­tent algorithm = when social net­works demote con­tent cre­at­or author­ity to pro­mote single con­tent per­form­ance to max­im­ise user engage­ment for ad revenue.

The single con­tent algorithm presents newly pub­lished con­tent to a lim­ited audi­ence sample size:

If the newly pub­lished con­tent tests suc­cess­fully, the social media algorithm pushes that con­tent to a slightly lar­ger stat­ist­ic­al sub­set. And so on.

This iter­at­ive pro­cess means that single pieces of con­tent worthy of going vir­al will go vir­al, a) even if it takes a longer time, and b) regard­less of the con­tent cre­at­or’s num­ber of followers.

Learn more: The Silent Switch

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