FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Riding the wave of DISRUPTION

Riding the wave of DISRUPTION

FOR HASAN Basar, the managing director of Bangkok Public Relations, the disruptive forces of digital technology that have buffeted many industries have caused him few troubles. But they have changed the way his company implements its strategies and plans.

Hasan is one of Thailand’s most experienced public relations and political communications consultants and has been practising in Thailand for more than 30 years. During that time he has been involved with many of Thailand’s major public relations challenges.
He has counselled more than 50 blue-chip organisations on their public relations needs. He has also counselled the government as well as the leaders of three political parties, more than 10 members of Cabinet, a governor, and a mayor. 
His experience includes working for leading corporations in many sectors including energy and power generation, property development, financial services, travel and tourism, consumer packaged goods, edutainment, broadcasting, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, and automobiles.

Riding the wave of DISRUPTION
It is a profession that he says he drifted into. “I went into public relations right out of college. It was at a time when investment banking was becoming very popular and most of my classmates became investment bankers,” he says.
“I actually disliked public relations because it was a poorly defined profession. Nobody could understand what a public relations person did. And I liked it for the very same reason: it allowed me to do what I wanted to do and then just call it ‘public relations advice’. 
Hasan says he likes looking at companies and seeing their long-term stakeholder management challenges and the things that will become problems for them long before people may generally believe that those problems could be heading their way.
“It’s like a game to see if I can guess the future in terms of what people will think and feel about a company or its products or a person. And then to start doing things that can maybe change the future for a client in terms of what people believe about them,” he says.
As for the challenges that new technology presents to the industry, he believes that it hasn’t really changed what public relations is all about.
“That sounds like a strange thing to say, but it’s true. It’s only changed the way we implement our strategies and the devising of public relations plans,” he says. “What technology has done is to add to the number and types of channels through which we can communicate and forced us to learn new ways of leveraging those powerful and new channels effectively.
“What it hasn’t changed is the most fundamental role of a public relations consultant: to understand how an audience feels about an idea or a product or an entity, and what they believe about them. And then, having understood that, to devise ways in which we can influence those feelings and convictions.
“Very often, it is simply about reframing ideas – half full or half empty? A darker shade of a clean white, or a lighter shade of a dirty black? All of this framing work is based on judgement and correctly reading public mood. If you get the framing right, it can work for you. If you frame it in a way that has low credibility, you simply waste your energies and funds, and still have a problem.”
Hasan says that an ability to read the public mood is also important because it can quickly change whether a frame works. 
“The building of a great new shopping mall in a neighbourhood can rapidly change from being a welcome symbol of progress to becoming an unwelcome disruption of a way of life,” he says.
“All of this work has little to do with technology. It has a lot to do with simple commonsense, experience, instinct, and some good research. You are dealing with people and moods, and that’s something which is never easy to predict. Just ask someone who’s married.”
Hasan says technology has made it easier to deliver messages, and to do so without authentication.
“And because of that, it has created a lot more clutter and it has resulted in a lot more fake news that has made it much harder for our own messages to be believed,” he says. “While we can now get people to hear what we say more easily, it has become much harder to get people to believe what we say.
“That’s where I believe that traditional newspapers have a great asset in their mastheads. Their mastheads are a symbol of trust and third-party vetting. With the increasing industrial scale use of fake news, fake comments, fake ‘Likes’, and fake opinions that are pushed out behind products and companies by people and organisations who do it on a full-time commercial basis, the websites of these mastheads are a safe refuge of relatively reliable information. 
“People sometimes forget that a newspaper’s primary role was as a guarantor of the trustworthiness of information rather than just being a channel of information. The latter role (of being a channel) has been in decline for a long time. The former role (of being a guarantor of trustworthiness) is in the ascendancy.”
He says that, in the old days, the volume of coverage and the believability of coverage generally came together.
“That’s why it was always taken for granted that anyone who got a lot of coverage of his messages would also have a lot of stakeholder support. Technology has disrupted this. The two are now separate,” Hasan says. “You can get a lot of coverage, but you may still not be guaranteed support of your stakeholders. One needs to look no further than the current national leadership to see proof of this.
“While they may have dominated every information channel in the country and have constantly been in the news across all media platforms for more than four years, it has still not guaranteed them a landslide victory in the next election. That’s because they have scored low on the ‘believability index’ as well as had some catastrophic issues with the framing of their messages.”
Hasan is encouraged by the view that technology has also increased the public’s ability to participate in any major undertaking. 
“Because of that, whether one is progressing a major public project or a large private sector one, public participation and stakeholder management have become essential to their ability to succeed,” he says. 
“Everyone can have an opinion that can be heard; and everyone can become a potential rallying point for massive opposition to a project.
“An effective public relations strategy now requires one to integrate a larger and more diverse pool of stakeholders into the ‘benefit sphere’ of any major project.”
 

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