Think on this: Is the term social media now irrelevant? Is social and online media now more correctly described as a virtual landscape or digital landscape? Is public relations now as much about how we are seen in each sphere?
Here’s a suggestion: In the near future, if not already, each of us will live in 2 spheres, the real world and the virtual world. The real world is our house and our family; our work and our weekends. The virtual world – the virtual landscape – will be a projection of ourselves, defined by what we have done and what we have said.
A few years on Facebook and Twitter, with our social antics and muttering, is just the beginning. Where we holiday (captured by the airline and hotel data bases), what we read (captured by Amazon etc), what we buy (captured at the cash registers) will be public information. Even restaurants will have internal CCTV to promote their venue to people choosing a table; so even where we eat-out will be public information. So will where we walk, because besides the CCTV on the streets our iPhone has a GPS app. When we misbehave, it will be public information, because once it’s before the courts or Wikipedia it is there for public consumption.
There is not much that will not be known about us in 5,10,15 years; the social landscape crawling with Google spiders will capture everything. It will work for us, and against, depending what we’ve done. So applying for that job, will be a confessional; you may as well be upfront about your past, because it’s there for a security/HR firm to unearth.
In the real world, we drive to work and rush from meeting to meeting; in this social landscape we can work from home and meet on Skype or Google+.
To some of us this is a threat to our privacy. To my daughter, of the Facebook generation, it’s just part of life. “I don’t consider privacy an asset,” she said.
We are our own brand. We can’t run, we can’t hide. In fact the harder we try, the more obvious it becomes; the absence of information will itself be revealing.
So, the more you want from life, the more you will have to reveal. If you want be CEO, or union official, it will be like public office. Not because you choose it, but because the job will require it. Put simply, people will want to know about you because you are the boss. So your past will haunt you and you might as well get used to it, and prepare for it now.
Be how you want to be seen. Live your brand.
For more on this there is a Q&A with Ethan McCarty, IBM’s Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy by Drew Neisser of Renegade, a NYC-based social media and marketing consultancy.
Also, Jeff Bulla is a constant source of good information on the minutiae of how social media will affect our lives.
I’m as staunch a defender of civil liberties as the next person, but I’m also a realist. I have long since given up trying to be private. Rather, I’ve adjusted to the concept that nothing I do is private. Because I don’t commit crimes, or rob the tax department, and have only made moderately stupid life-mistakes, there’s not a lot to hide – so why worry. So I don’t. Check me out, it’s interesting to a very few, but not intriguing.
How does public relations evolve to fit into this landscape? Watch this space…
