Why the biggest threat to companies is the remoteness of conversations, and how AI may solve it.

Welcome to the Speak PR podcast. My name is Jim James and I am the founder and managing director of EastWest PR. And during this podcast, it really, as always, just trying to share some of the, the learnings that I've had today in the hope that it may help you as you're trying to do better PR for your company or even for your clients. I had a fairly fun day and a fairly trying day in equal measure, really. I'm doing this late at night because lockdown is wonderful in that it gives us lots of time to be with our children. On the other hand, it means that we need to be with them when they're available and then get our own work done when they're hopefully going to bed. So sounding a little bit late in the night, so I apologize for that. But during the day, I spoke with some, some bright people who are also talking to young people about work. One of my university friends runs a very established PR firm here in the UK specializing in B2B work, and he's very busy. And he's saying that the coronavirus has brought on Good work for him and his agency, but he had furloughed two staff and has the remainder all working from home. And so the staff are young on the whole. And my friend and I, we lived Richard. We lived through the recession. We graduated in 1990 into the long queues of three and four million unemployed. So we've seen unemployment before. And ever since in varying degrees. But Richard was saying how one of the, the tasks now is to manage the expectations and the anxiety of his young team. And it led me on to thinking about some research that I had done many years ago when I was doing communications training into Professor Thomas Allen. Now, Professor Allen wrote a book in 1977 called Managing the Flow of Technology, and he, as a result of his work, created the Allen Curve. Now, the Allen Curve displays an exponential drop in frequency of communication between people as the distance between them grows. In fact, in the original MIT study, they had people sitting in offices effectively a basketball court away. And they found that if people were at either ends of the basketball court, the chances of them seeing each other even just once a week were like less than 10%. Amazing reduction in the opportunity just to catch up if you're not really just in the vicinity. So Richard and I's conversation today reminded me that now we've got people working from home, and we've got the technology of Zoom and Loom and Teams and all these other platforms. But Professor Allen actually updated his book in 2006 discussing the impact of technology, and they found that even with all the technologies available then, although admittedly not as many as we have now, there was still a marked decay In the use of all communication with distance. So it does seem as though whilst the heart may grow fonder with distance, the understanding does not grow stronger. So we have a challenge as PR people within our own teams now, and certainly with our audiences, and as entrepreneurs who are trying to engage and bring our teams with us on the vision and on the journey. it's even more important that we're learning how to create alignment and create some visioning. But the other aspect of this is the amount of communication that needs to take place that's proactive. And we've coined a term called the Active Communications Index. And the Active Communications Index, the ACI, is really all about getting some metrics into how often We communicate and through its channels. So quite often we find clients, and even as an entrepreneur myself, I communicate sporadically or even intermittently, especially internally. And that's that's really an issue because we give people a message or a group of people a message, and then we move on to the next task. And As Alan's Law would suggest, if people are at home, they're not experiencing the office or the showroom or the workshop or the factory floor. They're not getting validation from their peers. They're not kind of getting the shirt and tie or even the uniform on, which helps them to get their minds and their hearts back into the swing of the company. So as we run companies, we need to think about how we're communicating, how actively we're communicating, and the volume of that becomes quite hard to manage. So Rob and I have just implemented Zoho Social, which is a platform much like HubSpot and Buzzsprout and Hootsuite, which manages your social media messaging because it's simply not possible to manage all the channels frequently enough. So in, in Zoho, for example, we've added our 5 channels of LinkedIn and Facebook and Facebook group and Twitter and also a Facebook company page, and we can schedule and we can automate those posts as well. So what's happening now is we're able to start to schedule these, and some of them we can actually use the AI of the platform to do the scheduling. Now the issue with that, of course, is that the technology is starting to determine where and when you were sending out content. But of course there are even platforms now like Content Samurai that are helping people to make content using AI. So it's becoming possible to both automate and to auto-generate content using technology. Now, this creates an amazing opportunity for people running small companies, because if we can think of the stories and we can think of the messages and we can create these as graphics or as videos, infographics, text, podcasts like this. The technology now is enabling us to schedule and to reach out and to share that information across time zones simultaneously in a timed and organized way. So part of Speak PR which we've developed, which is a 5-step methodology for entrepreneurs, includes a story planner, a day-by-day step where you can put in a story for the day. And within the planner, we have this concept of the Active Communications Index, and we ask people to start to identify which channels they're putting their content through And which content they're creating every day, and one multiplied by the other gives you a frequency and gives you an overall index. So, as we start to see the impact of COVID on our businesses, we're starting to see that we've got these workers, like my friend Richard's workers, working from home, and some of them are a little bit scared. Some are certainly not understanding exactly what's going on. For many, it's It's even the first crisis they've lived through. So the importance becomes of maintaining an active communications index for our team, as well as our allies and our clients. And McKinsey have this week just put out a report saying that the next 90 days post-COVID-19 will be digital. And I think this is great. They've called out 4 particular aspects that they believe organizations should conform to in order to fully take advantage and to survive. Now, they talk about the need for companies to refocus their digital efforts towards the changing customer expectations, the use of data and AI to improve business operations, selectively modernizing technology capabilities, and increase the organizational drumbeat. Now, these are all great and valid, but what's missing in my view in this document is the specific articulation, expression, that organizations will have to address their communication strategies. Because these, these sort of technology and business-related initiatives within an organization will fail If the teams and the customers are not in alignment with these new visions, and as the Allen curve shows us, when our people are distributed, that curve is going to be accentuated. We saw that Twitter has said that its staff can continue to work from home permanently after the lockdown. Now. That's an amazing, an amazing opportunity, but it's also an amazing challenge. Ironically enough, for a company that's effectively a communications provider, Jack Dorsey and his team are going to have to engage both their customers with that, who frankly probably won't notice any difference, but they're also going to have to engage their teams. This week I've been doing my taxes, and I have a permanent residence in Singapore, and I I live in the UK, so I have a, you know, an interesting tax situation. And I rang the helpline and I went through to a lady who greeted me saying that I was the first caller that she'd had all day and she was delighted for the chance to have a chat. Now that's the first time I've ever got through the tax office. Frankly, probably the first time I've ever got through, but certainly the first time I've ever had a welcome like that where we had a bit of a chat About the weather and about homeschooling, and then we got on to my tax affairs. Now, it's a much more relaxed environment for that remote HMRC worker, but she was already saying she doesn't feel like going back on the commute and she likes to have time at home with her children. So how are organizations like yours going to re-engage those people? And I think they're going to do that through the belief in the vision, in the purpose, and in the leadership. Because we're going to have a case and cases where people start to realize that they're working for the right or the wrong company and are going to bind into it even more. So we've got this wonderful situation now where companies, small companies like mine, or maybe like yours, have the opportunity to start to communicate using automation and artificial intelligence in order to compete with these larger companies that, ironically enough, may start to suffer from the Allen Curve, the organizational challenge with time and and distance impacting their communication. Now, AI is coming whether we like it or not to our homes with Alexa and Siri. And my wife, who's a Chinese lady, just showed me how AI is already making a difference for us at home. I just bought her an iPad and she received that, we didn't see anybody because even the courier left it at the door. Now she has downloaded a new app which is called, um, WeRead from Tencent, which is a WeChat app. And for 20 RMB a month, which is just, you know, £2, she has access to literally thousands and thousands of audiobooks. Now, what's interesting about these audiobooks is that they're all read by AI. And having listened to them, and my wife is now constantly listening to them, uh, is that they sound like a native speaker. And you can toggle between male or female reader. So Chinese companies have been involved in AI for a long time already. And they've already got significant apps that are leveraging this power to go to consumers and give them what they want when they want it without any human interaction whatsoever. Now, I was thinking, what if your press releases and your case studies and your articles and your interviews started to be formatted but also to be delivered and read by AI. It's an opportunity really for us to start to think about creating personalized messaging to those people that we want to receive our information using AI, where we can't necessarily record each one of those. And let's face it, our language may not be right for that. But personalization at scale using the AI technology that is residing in a, in a platform like WeRead from Tencent is going to be transformative. So the Allen curve is going to mean that as we move further away from each other, the statistics show us that our propensity to communicate with those people far away will reduce. So the challenge for all of us now is to overcome that And the technology exists, but in order to overcome it, it's not the technology that we need to be sharing. It's our mission as founders and entrepreneurs. It's our passion for what we're trying to do with our businesses, and it's engagement for those people that we want to bring with us, be they employees or partners or customers. And that's really the opportunity and the challenge that that I've learned about today that I wanted to share with you. So I hope this is good for you wherever you are, whatever you're doing. I pray that you're well and safe and that you keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.