How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns And Social Media In The 21st Century by Edelman

How the internet changed everything – communications, campaigns and social media in the 21st century

By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland

1 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

How the internet changed everything – Communications, campaigns and social media In the 21st century

By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland In many respects the world was much simpler when I studied at Goldsmiths, twenty five years ago – particularly when it comes to people’s media habits. The number of UK adults reading at least one national daily newspaper on an average day in 1992 was 26.7m, making up almost 60% of the population. The BBC’s main evening news bulletin was watched by about 7 million people a night, with over 30% market share. Strategic communications was very much in its infancy in this country. The boardroom was instead dominated by advertising “gurus” like Maurice and Charles Saatchi. Public attitudes were shaped by a much smaller set of actors and by fewer more dominant traditional sources of information. In technology terms, life was much closer to the Mad Men era, when if you weren’t in the office, or in your club, you were out of contact. If you needed to be contacted quickly the pager was the ‘must have gadget’. Though to return the call, you’d need a plastic bag of 10p coins and a payphone.

Rudimentary then, this single invention has been the agent behind many of the big changes – behavioural and attitudinal – in my industry, the communications industry over the last quarter of a century. And particularly in the last decade, which has experienced rapid change. Whether it’s: • • • • •

The ability to campaign now at scale with real ease or; For individuals to make news, break news and have impact The ability to build communities and find advocates The ability to promote your cause, your policies, your products Launch careers, build careers and in some cases end careers

This single invention, has not changed the game, it has invented an entirely new one. The internet is the great “facilitator”, it has allowed us to find, store and exchange information like never before. It has played a role, either as a principal actor, or supporting one, in five key trends over the past decade.

But a month before I turned up at Fresher’s week, in August 1991, an innovation as important as the invention of Gutenberg printing press in the mid-15th century or the combustion engine in the mid-19th, revealed itself. I am of course talking about the launch of the public internet by Tim Berners-Lee.

2 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

I want to examine those five trends, and how they have impacted the communications industry. They are: •

•

• • •

The emergence of an era of mass distrust in public institutions, politics, business and media The rise of the individual influencer, powered by social networks How the nature of campaigns and campaigning has changed The growing power of global media and elite audiences And finally, how mobile is amplifying all of the above

1 Distrust

Over the past decade we have been rocked by a series of scandals that have punched a hole in the public’s trust in some of the most important pillars in society. In business there are the crises that command global attention – Enron, BP, Worldcom, Libor, foreign exchange manipulation, the catastrophic collapse of Lehmans. Then there are those that play big at home – Thomas Cook, Sports Direct, Woolworths. Month in month out, we read about another business scandal and these corporate crises are having a corrosive effect. Even the bullet proof reputation of countries like Germany have faced a crisis of confidence in business – whether it be Siemens and its bribery scandal or most recently VW and emissions. In the first two weeks of that issue, VW’s share price collapsed 30%, wiping billions of value away.

Alongside these business crises, executive pay has risen sharply relative to medium pay, at a time social mobility is on the decline and the middle classes under pressure. This hasn’t helped business’s image either. In terms of attitude towards business, Edelman’s annual global Trust Barometer survey has found a growing divergence between the general public and the “informed publics”, who are university educated and employed at a mid-management level or above. The informed publics, who can be said to be prospering in the current economic structure, are on average 10 points more trusting than the general public. This is no coincidence – we trust the system that delivers for us. In politics, MP expenses in this country, corruption allegations in countries like France, Spain and Italy, economic incompetence in countries like Greece, the war on terror and invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and most recently action in Libya, and in-action in Syria, have led to unprecedented levels of distrust. Distrust in politics has triggered the emergence of political parties and doctrines that many had thought had been dispatched to history books. Who could have predicted the election of Jeremy Corbyn? Who therefore, can say with confidence that someone on the other end of the political spectrum like Donald Trump will flame out? What seemed fanciful in the past, is a political reality today. And in all of this, the public are responding, and coping with an environment in which the social compact is declining: do well at school, go to university; work hard at university, get a great job; work hard in the job, get promoted; earn more money; start a family; buy a house; send your kids to good school; invest in retirement; have a well-funded pension; retire with relative comfort.

3 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

Each aspect of this journey isn’t guaranteed in the way it was for previous generations.

What we are seeing is frustration and anger at two important levels: young people facing global competition for jobs and the frustrated middle classes seeing their spending power and economic prospects eroding. This is then influencing public discourse and consequently informing public policy.

It is also re-routing and interrupting traditional trust hierarchies. We now trust those closest to us and those most like us over authority figures. It is “people like me” and “regular employees” who have eclipsed the CEO as a source of trusted information. Companies are now judged, not on their profits or leadership, but by how well they listen and respond to their customers and employees. It must be said that trust is not an unalloyed good – societies that are too trusting and deferential are vulnerable to corruption and bad ideas can go unchallenged. But the collapse of trust has high costs – economic growth is slower in countries where trust is lower, because distrust is a barrier to trade and exchange.

Outside of party politics, the role of the State itself has come under scrutiny. Arguably it started with the WTO riots just over a decade ago, but most recently, the likes of Wikileaks and the revelations of Edward Snowdon has fuelled a sense in some (but not all countries) that the State itself cannot be trusted to act in the interests of the citizens it serves.

And, to misquote GK Chesterton: When we cease to trust authority, we don’t believe nothing, we believe everything. A distrusting society is one ill at ease with itself – fertile ground for zealotry, extremism and quackery. A society that trusted medical professionals would not have endangered the health of its population with the MMR scare.

In an environment of distrust, the media hasn’t fared any better, in fact it has been a major contributor to the sour public mood. Phone hacking across many UK newspaper titles, Jimmy Saville’s activities while at the BBC, recent scandals like Brian Williams the anchor of NBC’s evening news programme caught out lying about being under fire in Iraq, all add to historic levels of distrust, to the point where the citizens of 60% of the countries we study for the Edelman Trust Barometer distrust their media.

This is the environment we all operate in now – whether you’re in the communications industry or not. The world of mass scepticism. The gap between aspiration and reality has become so wide that the job of trust building is long and can be arduous.

From health professionals (think serial killer GP Harold Shipman, or any number of hospital crisis) to sport (Lance Armstrong, Sepp Blatter, Russian athletics, IAAF), to the judiciary (judges watching pornography on laptops in chambers); many of the institutions and civic roles we held true have been tarnished with scandal.

One of the reasons that trust has declined at such a rate has been the fact that it isn’t just the media that holds power to account, it is any individual with access to the internet.

Many of these scandals have been unearthed and made public through the massive growth in digital and the internet, which is equipping people with the means to scrutinise and challenge power and authority in new ways. 4 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

2 Social Media

The invention of social media means anyone can be an activist, a campaigner or a source of influence. It has taken power away from the traditional media gatekeepers and fuelled the rise of the individual influencers, who have the potential to be more powerful than many media brands (sometimes, including the ones they work for). At the start of 2015, there were 2.8 billion active social media accounts and despite the fact social has achieved penetration of 29% of the global population, the number of accounts is growing at an annual rate of 12%. The average social media user spends 2.4 hours a day on these platforms, meaning that they have enormous power to shape people’s perceptions of the world. In 2014, when Facebook tweaked their algorithm to encourage people to share news, Facebook instantly increased its hold on news distribution - increasing referrals to top news sites up by 42%. Social media breaks stories – from the birth of Prince George to the death of Amy Winehouse and from the assault on Osama Bin Laden’s compound, to the Boston Marathon bombings. But more importantly, it is integral to the dynamics of news reporting – an easy source of quotes and colour and a proxy for public sentiment. Just take the horror of the Paris terrorist attack. Social media was a tool that the traditional media drew on heavily, using mobile phone footage of the horror, tweets from those caught up in the events and tributes to those who died. Social media is also a tool used very effectively by the terrorists to spread their backward doctrine.

The porosity between traditional media and social media is increasing. UK journalists are twice as likely to use “you” as a source if they follow you on social channels, than if they don’t. It came as no surprise to me when the former CEO of Reuters Media and The Economist recently described Twitter as the most important news organisation in the world. But the codes of conduct governing these individuals are still being negotiated. For example: •

•

The Advertising Standards Agency is now struggling to impose traditional standards of transparency on individual bloggers, warning them last year against unmarked sponsored posts Last month, Australian model Essena O’Neil retired from Instagram, complaining that it presented a version of her life that was “contrived perfection”, damaging to her followers (though some suggest this was an elaborate tactic to build further social media profile) The #GamerGate hashtag campaign provoked an epic battle across the video games industry over standards of transparency in gaming reviews and alleged misogyny in the gaming community And at Goldsmiths, NUS employee Bahar Mustafa was charged with threatening and grossly offensive messaging on social networks, prompting some of her fiercest critics to leap to her defence in the name of free speech

5 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

Individual influencers have multiplied the complexity of any communications challenge. They are potentially powerful advocates and critics and increasingly, they interact with mainstream media, sharing news and creating it with their commentary.

What is also happening is newspapers are increasingly looking to the individual journalist as a key cog in the wheel of getting content out there. Journalists are no longer employees, they are individual influencers and brands in their own right – with social media followers.

Whether you are a company CEO, politician or public figure, they all now communicate in a metaphorical open club, where the hecklers can be heard and also shape the perceptions of what is being said.

In May 2015, Edelman carried out research to find out whether Buzzfeed’s attempt to build its reputation for political coverage by hiring established political commentators had paid off. We found that, when writing for the brand, these journalists’ credibility was dragged down by the brand they were working for – but when they posted news and commentary on their personal social feeds, they were more influential and trusted.

Social media is also a magical accelerant to communicators. We used to ask ourselves: “Will the right journalist run this story?” Now, we must ask “Will people share this story?”

Journalists too ask this question and that is changing the nature of their work.

Because pictures are more likely to be shared than words, media groups are hiring producers, designers and data journalists, to produce infographics, photosets and video. The FT’s most-viewed stories are “explainer videos” and they are focusing their content budget on shortfilm as a result. Visual content is more expensive to produce, which means media brands are more likely to take content directly from brands or partner with them to fund content. Though it is also the case that brands are supporting innovation in journalism, with Mini and GE’s marketing departments providing the investment required for the New York Times to offer its first piece of Virtual Reality content to over 1.5m users last week – in this instance a piece of emotionally charged journalism telling the stories of three children displaced as refugees. Dwell time on this piece of video – between 14 and 15 minutes, completely unprecedented.

This is a powerful illustration of how much trust and influence is increasingly in the hands of individuals, not the institutions – a phenomenon that is reshaping every brand’s media strategy. Let me give you three examples. Firstly, when Paramount wanted to build buzz about Zoolander 2 at the Valentino fashion show, they tipped off their preferred bloggers and influencers in advance and made sure they had front row seats. Their updates were what created the story for the mainstream media who followed in their wake – taking the influencer videos shot on mobile to cover the story. Secondly, our client Xbox now considers our work with YouTubers to be more important than our work with the gaming media. We embed vloggers in everything we do – from a recent piece of work when we took four influencers to experience Tomb Raider in real life in Siberia, to our in-game chatshow for Minecraft, broadcast on Twitch.

How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

Thirdly, in politics, Ed Milliband, in the final countdown to the General Election vote, looked not to the traditional media but to a youth influencer, Russell Brand, to help reach Labour’s political grassroots choosing to give a big sit down interview to Brand’s The Trews platform. Brand is very aware of his influencer status, admitting that the main motivation for requesting the interview was to play a part in evicting the Tories from No. 10. He said: “I asked a couple of people: ‘Do you think that we should interview Ed Miliband and see if we can help get the Tories out of government', because obviously it would be good if we could." Though in this example, perhaps even Russell Brand rather overestimated his abilities. But the point is that gradually, the media ‘gatekeepers’ are losing their power as intermediaries and becoming aggregators – hoping to drive the right economics of scale by capturing as much relevant content as quickly as possible. The analysis and commentary that was once integral to the process of news gathering is increasingly outsourced to the crowd on social and their readers below the line. In response, brands are inverting their own media models. For example, our client Manchester City FC realised years ago, that digital technology enabled them to replace their journalist-first approach to news and content distribution, with a fan-first approach. Now, if Sky Sports News wants an interview with the chairman, they can lift it directly from the website at the same time that the fans see it. Rather than court the Manchester Evening News’ dwindling readership by plying their sports writers with free sandwiches, they simply hired the best writers and gave them a direct relationship with the fans, via the website.

And so-far, the public seems relatively relaxed about the fact that the companies are creating the content. Last year, for the first time, “a brand I use” overtook “a journalist” as a source of trusted information about that company. Think about that for a moment: As long as you feel you have a relationship with that company, you are more likely to trust what they say about themselves, than you are a journalist, who is theoretically paid to provide independent scrutiny of that company’s claims as a service to readers. There is a longer lecture to be given about what is happening here, about earned brand loyalty, and distrust in the media. But that is for another day. While the communications landscape is becoming more complex, the speed of transmission of news and debate has become instant. The traditional “news cycle” has vanished and the speed at which organisations must be able to respond is instant. I was talking to Wadah Khander the acclaimed journalist and former DG of al Jazeera Networks last night on the consequences of this point. He said the very reason we don’t understand what is going on in the Middle East, and therefore are incapable of effective policy responses, is in part because the media no longer cover the region in any depth. You cannot understand the spirit of a place, or the issues, if, as he told me, you have to do 10 live segments a day. He pointed out that you will understand Iraq when you understand that violence between Sunnis and Shias began one thousand four hundred years ago – it’s a point that is difficult to reflect in a 90 second, two-way.

So, as Wadah Khandar would agree, the need for speed if you like, can contribute to short-term thinking, which can lead to short-term planning, and poor decision making. More thought needs to be put into planning for each eventuality and designing communications processes that are more streamlined and agile. The challenge for the communication advisor is balancing speed with strategic precision. The social age has also created an echo-chamber, where “people like me” are increasingly important guardians of what one reads. Reuters Institute research finds that media organisations’ ability to “curate the news” with their homepages or running orders is declining, as more people access individual stories directly via Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.

These echo-chambers create righteous feeding frenzies, where individuals and organisations can find themselves targeted for intense criticism before the facts have been established or nuance debated. That’s a challenge for communicators, but a bigger challenge for society. When Nobel scientist Tim Hunt spoke about relationships between men and women in the laboratory at a conference in South Korea, his comments were being misrepresented on Twitter by commentators around the world within moments, by people who had no understanding of the context in which he said them, or even the full text of what he said. The original meaning was lost and he was forced to resign from UCL because the world believed that he had made precisely the opposite point to the one he intended. In Jon Ronson’s excellent book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, he interviews Justine Sacco, who was just about to board a plane when she tweeted: 'Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!'

By the time she landed, she discovered that her words had triggered international outrage on social media and she had been fired. Ronson writes: It’s possible that Sacco’s fate would have been different had an anonymous tip not led a writer named Sam Biddle to the offending tweet. Biddle was then the editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s tech-industry blog. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers and eventually posted it on Valleywag, accompanied by the headline, “And Now, a Funny Holiday Joke From IAC’s P.R. Boss.” Ronson goes on… In January 2014, I received an email from Biddle, explaining his reasoning. “The fact that she was a P.R. chief made it delicious,” he wrote. “It’s satisfying to be able to say, ‘O.K., let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’ And it did. I’d do it again.” Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own — a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see. Was Sacco satirising prejudice, as she claims? Or indulging in it, as her critics assumed. The fact is, in a dynamic like the one Ronson describes – it doesn’t matter. There’s no time to find out and the right of reply is secondary to the impulse to share and signal one’s own virtue. Tone, is rather difficult to communicate in 140 characters.

3 campaigns

The environment of distrust I have described and the power that social platforms provide have come together to fuel the growth of single-issue campaigns. It is single-issue campaigns that have become the driving force in political and social discourse. Because we are less trusting and more sceptical, we are ready to challenge authority and believe the most lurid criticism, in ways we weren’t in the past. And social media now allows populations to be quickly mobilised by the network effect, built around Change.org or 38Degrees petitions or Facebook pages. Mobile is now enabling individuals to become part of the story, adding new layers of commentary and allowing campaigns to be born anywhere in the world and travel everywhere. Traditional “interest group” structures like political parties and trade unions are struggling to keep up with the campaign dynamic. While the media industry, often starved of resources and desperate to maintain their relevance in a social conversation that moves at the speed of light, tend to report campaigns uncritically, and place in them disproportionate emphasis and importance. As the media has fragmented and peer-to-peer has grown in importance, facts are now debated like never before and objective truth is disregarded. During the Scottish Referendum campaign, we saw gross misrepresentation of facts by both sides – both from the official campaigns and by leading influencers.

From projected oil revenues to an independent Scotland’s prospects of gaining quick re-entry to the EU, both side’s version of reality was so far apart that serious debate about the pros and cons of independence was often impossible. In the US, MSNBC described the last Republican Primary debate as being one in which “reality took a beating.” Candidates announced that a growing US economy is actually in recession and that energy production is falling when it is growing. Telling the truth is less important than telling your supporters what they want to hear. Instead of calling out candidates’ lies, Republicans are attacking the broadcasters for asking challenging questions and openly considering limiting debates to partisan environments like Glenn Beck’s channel The Blaze. This kind of tribalism is evident too in the way that like-minded crowds can be mobilised instantly. In March 2015, a Downing Street petition to force the BBC to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson reached 1 million signatures within days and became the fastest-growing campaign Change.org had ever hosted. The petitioners quickly became headline news, which in turn drove more signatures – a feedback loop that cycled in minutes and hours, not weeks and months. Activists are now able to quickly mobilise large groups with real speed.

9 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

It is an amplification of what I experienced when communications director at Reuters almost ten years ago, and a photographic stringer called Adnan Hajj photoshopped ordinance falling from some Israeli jets during the Lebanon/Israel conflict. Then overnight I received, many thousands of emails which all had uncannily similar text. There were a few flavours, but they covered the spectrum of everything from Reuters being anti-Semitic, to the more straightforward incompetent. That was a “gate” moment by the way, in this case “Reuters Gate”, my next “gate”, “Sachsgate” involved Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand broadcasting rather inappropriate comments on the latter’s radio 2 latenight show. The “gatifcation” of issues is a terrific tactic in the armoury of the traditional media to turn a scandal up to 11. All of these trends combined mean that life has become tremendously more challenging for companies and governments. For communications agencies like mine, which help organisations navigate this complexity there is opportunity in terms of the tools now available to communicate. It’s a much harder world for the advertising industry that grew up in an age where the message could be controlled and TV was king.

4 global audience

One of the trends that we have seen is how joined up the world now is. How many of you, gave the wash of the tricolour to your social media profile on Saturday? I certainly had friends in Australia, America, Canada, Iceland and of course France do it.

The internet and social platforms have flattened the earth – in more profound ways than Thomas Freidman wrote ten years ago. This is particularly the case when you look at traditional media. In the last decade we have seen a bar-bell emerge with big global media brands on one end, and niche specialist players at the other end. The economics of a predominantly free news media are driving the growing dominance of global brands that transcend national boundaries – from established names like The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and MailOnline to digital native brands like HuffPo, Vice and Buzzfeed. Readership are coalescing around selfidentifying global tribes, built around shared passions and interests – or, to put it another way, global echo chambers. The Guardian aims to be the voice of Anglosphere progressivism, Drudge aims to do the same for libertarianism. This process of globalisation is encouraged by the growth of the English language and the rapid growth of literacy and university education worldwide, producing a new, mass-intelligent, internationally aware audience for brands to target. Around 1.8 billion people now speak English. The number of international students has exploded from approximately 750,000 in 1975 to 3.5 million at the end of the last century. Many of these brands are catering to a new global elite, who’ve been to the same schools, universities and business schools work at the same international companies and read the same titles. You can now reach a good cross section of the international business community with one story in The FT.

Here was a campaign demonstrating unity – in this case a visual – that travelled around the world instantaneously. 10 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015

The rise of global news brands and conversations has heightened the need for organisations to consider how they act everywhere. Companies are far more likely to be exposed for poor practice in another part of the world than they were a decade ago – and readers everywhere will know about it. But the paradox is that despite this growing global consciousness, the post-war international structures are proving inadequate to deal with global challenges we face. On climate change, the refugee crisis and the rise of cross-border conflict, supra-national organisations have been left paralysed just as the traditional powers have withdrawn from the world.

5 mobile

In other words, the police blame the public for using smartphone footage to hold the police to account for their actions, in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Anyone can be a journalist – and that gives the individual citizen real power. And this powerful, ubiquitous technology is amplifying all of the trends we’ve discussed so far: •

•

Finally, this item – the smartphone – is accelerating all the change I have described. With a single device in the palm of your hand you can access all the world’s information and reach billions of connected people through Twitter, Instagram, Vine and Periscope. You can capture breaking news in high definition and super slow-motion and beat all the world’s news organisations to the punch. The footage you capture is often deeply personal and immersive in a way that no professional camera operator could hope to replicate. We saw this from Paris over the weekend. A single smartphone is the most powerful piece of equipment ever invented, but it’s their ubiquity that gives them their real power. The heads of the FBI and DEA have both recently blamed “The Ferguson Effect” for a supposed rise in crime rates in the US, with police reluctant to confront crime for fear of being filmed.

•

Cameras and platforms like Periscope are enabling instant citizen journalism, making individual influencers even more important Mobile is increasing the amount of news content we consume, and the degree to which we rely on social curation to learn about the world. In just three years in the UK, the frequency with which we consume news on a Smartphone has leapt by 50%, according to the latest figures from the Reuters Institute; And the growth of apps at the expense of browsing means that we are using fewer traditional news services, where we do, it’s the big global media brands. Reuters found that we are 10% more likely to access only one news sources per day on our phones, compared with our laptops.

What is most challenging for the traditional news media though is the advertising experience on mobile is poor. It’s not a great device for delivering a tailored and sophisticated advertising experience. But with more and more news content experienced on mobile, much of it as discussed earlier discovered via social media not an organisation’s homepage, figuring out a sustainable model remains elusive for most, but not all.

conclusion I began by saying the world was a simpler place when I was at Goldsmiths. But the truth is, the world from a media, communications and marketing perspective is far more interesting and exciting than it has ever been before. The web and now mobile is providing richer, smarter, more creative ways of working. Media brands still matter, but now individuals play their part from being recipients to active contributors. Technology allows brands to communicate in incredibly creative and exciting ways and to engage genuinely with consumers and fans. We are now able to project and reach global audiences at relatively low cost, broadcasting from pretty much anywhere in the world, mobilising and galvanising support across borders.

It is demonstrably the case that we are also experiencing the downsides of an always on, always broadcasting social and traditional media. Most worrying, in my mind, is the battle for facts and the distortion both knowingly and unknowingly of reality, and the associated decline in the quality of public rhetoric. I also remain concerned about the de-investment in journalism due to the disruption from digital and what that means for public discourse. Graduates today are entering a world where traditional hierarchies are being challenged – political, social and in media. For those who can master this new world of influence, who can positively and creatively use the tools on offer (and invent new ones), the next decade is likely to herald in even more change.

Campaigns can be waged and won and the general public are making their voice heard – though Jeremy Clarkson wasn’t reinstated… The recent VR experiment by The New York Times shows how quickly technology is moving and what could be possible in terms of levels of engagement and how brands will communicate in the future.

12 How The Internet Changed Everything – Communications, Campaigns, And Social Media In 21st Century, By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland – Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 17 November 2015