Corporate

Yesterday evening I went to a panel discussion about web 2.0 and it’s influence on corporate communication and public relations. It took place at the Literaturhaus in Munich, which is by the way a quite nice location for such events and was organized by the PR agency Fink & Fuchs. The event startet with a speech by Prof. Zerfaß of the Universität Leipzig to get an overview about the current development in web 2.0 and was followed by a discussion. To see the official program and the speakers, please visit the website of the event.

I made no notes because we were told to get all the information afterwards within a few days, but I want to list some of the discussed and most interesting points:

1. Like it is in North America today, the trend goes from textbased corporate information to the usage of more multimedia elements like video clips.
2. The hype about web 2.0 and the used technologies for it will slow down. Blogs and Wikis are not that important than we were told by the (classical) media itself. Lots of people using blogs and wikis passively, but don’t write for them.
3. Blogs and Wikis and all the other web 2.0 stuff won’t replace the existing channels for corporate communication and public relation. They are simply new and additional channels.
4. Which of the new channels are supported or not should be analysed very carefully because of short resources (people, budget). They don’t expand in the same way like the amount of communications channels. It was said too, that it’s normally not necessary and reasonable to support all of them.
5. Communication via web 2.0 can hardly be controlled by companies. Therefore this tools will force them to more honesty and sincereness.

The panel discussion itself looses a bit the focus on coporate communications and stressed the influence from web 2.0 on print media, which was quite sad. But I want to mention one interesting points out of this: Like companies, the publishers are forced to a certain sincereness and back to a kind of well-founded journalism to demarcate from user generated content. This was seen as big chance for the established publishers.

One thing I want to add by myself: my point of view is that no company can decide wether it will participate in Web 2.0 or not. It’s already a part of it.