You're a business manager announcing a bold new concept, convinced it will revolutionize your industry. You want attention. You want to communicate the big vision and the substance of it.
Fast-forward 12 months-things aren't moving along as fast as you expected. Technology development, investment decisions, test marketing, and infrastructure deployment took much longer than anticipated.
In keeping with common technology-industry practice, you also pre- announced your initiative, meaning you have probably created overly ambitious expectations. Now your credibility is challenged by the media, analysts, and customers.
What you are facing is post-hype syndrome.
Technology is causing rapid change in every industry. Challenges that used to be confined primarily to Silicon Valley-the special problems of public relations in technology-driven markets-are crossing over to mainstream industries like banking and telecommunications. Managers in these hothouse environments must now communicate to clients, customers, and shareholders a vision of the future years before it actually arrives in corporate offices or households.
Vision and hype are at opposite ends of a continuum. Credibility is what will determine how a given message is perceived.
There is a fine line between a credible vision that people accept and pure hype. There is a point at which credibility is defeated by over- promising.
Excessive hype can cause lasting damage. One risk is negative news coverage in the form of skepticism and articles of the "whatever happened to?" variety. Another is being tagged as a "flash in the pan." Such problems are compounded in technology markets where products are announced before they are completely ready. Given its involvement in smart cards, the Internet, and other leading-edge phenomena, financial services has become one of these markets in which executives must wake up to the hazards.
Using public relations for the strategic end of upsetting the competition is a particularly dangerous game. Reputations are at risk from taking an overly aggressive and dramatic pose with an innovation that does not get off the ground. The damage to credibility can be irreparable.
Building credibility and shaping public perception is the public relations function. From my own PR company's vantage point-working with mainstream industry clients that are increasingly affected by technology- the vision-hype risk is readily apparent.
One client, the Smart Card Forum, brought together a cross-industry and government membership to promote chip card technology and applications. Its challenge was to attract media attention while not falling victim to post- hype syndrome as the systems evolved over a period of years.
We met this challenge by being realistic about the time-line for widespread adoption of the technology; crafting a written message that defined the key points we wanted to communicate and the supporting logic; addressing the timing issues and obstacles openly and specifically; and training spokespeople on addressing the issues to media representatives so as to avoid over-hyping.
We conducted media-education briefings with background packages and a videotape; fostered discussions among forum members on the leading-edge issues; publicized research findings and results of membership surveys; and held industry roundtables.
The net, cumulative result has been to build and maintain a reputation as an authoritative source of reliable information as interest in the field crosses over from the trade press to mainstream media.
In the rush and pressure to create excitement around a future vision it is important that cooler heads prevail, with the aim of making sure a communications strategy is effective both today and tomorrow.
For a management whose goal is to create a proper long-term perception and sustain interest, over-hyping can only lead to problems. Public relations planning does makes perfect. It far more important and preferable to win a war of perception rather than a battle of hype.
