Dealing in knowledge

The lights went on for me big time a fortnight ago as I attended a knowledge management seminar held by Software Futures. The keynote speaker was the totally inspirational Prof Nick Bontis from Canada, perhaps the world`s foremost authority on the tightly inter-related subjects of knowledge management and intellectual capital.

Those practitioners and clients who have seen the light are reaping the rewards and climbing up the value chain.

Reaping the rewards

These subjects have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy such enormous press coverage that I`m sure most of the universe is aware of what they are and their importance to business. So they hardly need revisiting, but I`ll share two insights with you and perhaps you`ll share my excitement:

• The first is profound: It is the role of the Internet in the dissemination of knowledge. Bontis`s observation was that the railroad had fulfilled agriculture by providing a channel for distributing produce; that modern shipping had fulfilled manufacturing for the same reason; and that the Internet is maximising the potential of the human brain by allowing hundreds of millions of people to be connected to each other - effectively permitting the flow of knowledge.
• The second insight is as profound in its own way. It is that we in the IT PR industry are foursquare in the knowledge game. We have knowledge, in varying degrees, of our clients, the industry and the media. How we leverage this knowledge will be a key determiner of how well we do for our clients and, by extension, how well we perform as public relations companies.

Metcalfe`s Law states that the power of a network grows with each additional computer connected to it. A key reason for this, clearly, is that it allows millions of people (more than 150 million, in fact) around the world to share knowledge. (They can also share naughty pictures and host trivial Web sites, but that`s another discussion.)

The Internet has in effect created one enormous, loosely linked brain; something akin to a new Jungian subconscious.

The people who make up this "brain" are clearly the elite of the world - those with the highest net worth. They are already the "haves", and their participation in this knowledge ring will accelerate them still further away from the billions of "have-nots". (This has far-reaching social implications, but again, that`s another discussion.)

The profile of people in this knowledge ring, and the relative ease with which they can be reached, mandates that a large chunk of our PR focus must be on the Net. But there is another pressure. We are sharing knowledge, not pushing parochial points of view. Everyone on the Web can tell the difference between PR-speak and real, valid information. They will read the one, and ignore the other. The onus is on us, then, as PR practitioners, and on our clients, to provide real, value-added information rather than just product punts. That is the way of the Web, and to ignore it is to lose potential readers.

There was a PR model, still widely in use, which said you didn`t have to know too much about your client`s business - and by "know" I mean really understanding his business, right down to technical level. That model is way past its sell-by date.

The new model mandates that you have account managers who intimately understand your client`s business and know every point of leverage; and that you have writers who can translate your client`s requirements into articles that will add value to publications and readers. You need, in short, to provide a conduit for releasing knowledge and transferring it.

This is, for me, the new model of PR. Those practitioners and clients who have seen the light are reaping the rewards and climbing up the value chain. They are the new breed of most admired companies.

And they get there because they are prepared to share knowledge.

Tip of the week

How digital is your PR practice? Are you leading or lagging behind the digital wave?

The leaders are those who understood a decade ago that it was only logical to deliver press releases digitally - by whatever mechanism. The laggards continued to send faxes and printouts and then require publications to retype their words.

Few PR companies still send releases on paper (at least, one hopes so). So it`s time to look at the next wave - the digital supply chain of images.

The world is moving to a point where all photographs will be created, supplied and processed digitally. Yet we still have a situation where we take analogue pictures and courier them to newspapers where they are scanned into digital form.

We - and the publications - are still thinking about the transfer of atoms. We need to get into Nicholas Negroponte territory and think about the transfer of bits.

It won`t happen overnight. Indeed, it will take years before all publications buy in to this way of doing things. But we must take the first steps, and as always the first one is attitudinal. Think digital; set up a pilot relationship with a publication that`s conducive to testing the new paradigm, and slowly broaden its adoption.

Every player in the value chain will be the better for it.