Information Battle

Strategy & Business Article on How to Win the Information Battle: Lessons from a Modern War (reg. req.) -- suggests tactics that CXO bloggers do every day:

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Iraq war is that managing real-time communications is as important as managing real-time processes. Communication is moving from being a peripheral, specialist responsibility to being an essential and integral element of corporate leadership. No matter the organization -- government, business, nonprofit -- the roles of professional communicators who lead communications functions are being reinvented and reinvigorated. As the Iraq conflict proved, they hold the power to wield crucial offensive and defensive strategic weapons for converting information into understanding.

The article highlights three key lessons for businesses: You can't resist the pressure to be open, so don't try -- Continually contextualize the flow of information -- and PR functions must be engaged at the top of the organization.

I don't care for military marketing analogies, but there is much to learn from their best practices.

I would add that in business you cannot control how employees interact with their environment (nor would you want to), so the message can't simply reside at the top. An email leak is a click away. PR, if you call it that, is increasingly an internal exercise. So trust your employees, teach them and empower them.

Comments

[BillSeitz]

Hmmm, I read this more of a description of spin-doctoring.

[Ross Mayfield]

Bill --

It is, or that was what the article is about. The difference is the level of engagement required from decision makers and the pace of engagement. The article even mentions blogs as one of the reasons...so many outlets to fact check and provide alternative spin.

What would be different, however, is what I suggest at the bottom of the post -- engaging at the center of decision making, but also enabling decentralized voices to post on their own -- because organizations aside from the military can't control message.

Thanks,
Ross