The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

The 2nd Flow and the Internet

The first three PR models focus on the 1st influence flow, our influence with our stakeholders. Even where the two-way symmetrical model for PR is adopted (honest and open two-way communication and mutual give-and-take), the emphasis remains on treating the 1st and 3rd influence flows equally. Or does it? What about the 2nd flow (our stakeholders’ influence with each other in respect to us)?

I mentioned earlier that Grunig continues to support the validity of the two-way symmetrical model in the digital age and in Paradigms of Global Public Relations in the Age of Digitalization,³⁸ he specifically responds to quotes from two books: ‘The Web has changed everything’, according to Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge in Putting the Public back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR³⁹; and ‘… it is hard to avoid making the claim that ‘the internet changes everything’ … for public relations the unavoidable conclusion is that nothing will ever be the same again’, from David Phillips and Philip Young in Online Public Relations: A Practical Guide to Developing an Online Strategy in the World of Social Media.⁴⁰ They continue:

[The] Excellence [study] characterizes the vector of communication as being between an organization and its publics, and is concerned with the balance – the symmetry – of this transaction. The bold claim that emerges from the arguments put forward for ‘the new PR’ is that the fundamental vector of ...