The tragedy of high volume, low impact communications

Dear reader, your attention is finite. Many believe I should be trying to capture as much of it as possible, every day and across paid, earned, shared and owned channels, in order to quickly hit the seven interactions that it supposedly takes to convert a prospect.

However, a new paper, published in the journal, Public Relations Review, suggests that our profession’s focus on maximising attention is socially damaging. This is because it’s driving PR professionals to continually increase the volume of content they produce in order to earn more attention, which inadvertently distracts society away from more important issues. 

That’s very likely true, but I believe that this constant obsession with churning out new content is not only distracting for consumers, it’s also distracting for PR professionals, many of who are so preoccupied with hitting volume-based targets that they fail to identify the most effective route to helping their organisation to achieve its goals. 

The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’

The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ is a metaphorical concept that states that when individuals have access to a public resource, they usually act in their own self-interest and, in doing so, deplete the shared resource for everyone. 

Typical examples usually centre around overconsumption, for example fast fashion or overfishing. However, the paper makes the argument that public attention is also a valuable and finite resource that’s currently being exploited by the PR profession through content overload. 

We see the evidence for this every day on our news aggregator sites, in our social feeds and in the countless newsletters that arrive in our inbox - and published studies confirm that it’s the case, with global data volume now more than doubling every three years. 

The paper describes the modern world as being based on an economy of attention and states that, since the population’s attention is limited by nature, the seemingly unlimited volume of content is detracting focus from relevant collective and social problems that need to be addressed. Ultimately, the author calls for a reduction of communications output.

Volume and diminishing returns

I’ve worked in healthcare PR and communications for around 20 years. It’s an interesting and inspiring field and there’s no shortage of great stories to tell. 

Over the last few months in particular though, new clients are telling us that they’re looking for a change in approach as, while they, their teams and their agencies have been working hard on content creation and dissemination, they aren’t seeing the business impact that they anticipated from this effort.

I believe that what they’re experiencing is the concept of diminishing returns in action. If we simply aim to increase content volume without any increase in resources (people, financial or technological) or change in strategy, then, usually, the quality of that content will go down over time as ideas are mined.

Typically, this reduced quality then leads to reduced impact, which then increases the pressure on the team to further ramp up the volume of content to try to tackle the decline. 

A recent report found that nine in 10 PR professionals have experienced issues with mental health over the last year, with overwhelming workload the key factor. But the focus on volume is not only increasing pressure on people, it’s also driving poor practice, such as spamming irrelevant journalists in a desperate quest for results – something that the Observer’s restaurant critic, Jay Rayner, recently complained about.

Fortunately, with the right approach, we can step away from the hamster wheel of constant content creation, and reduce our output while increasing our impact. The holy trinity is increased value for organisations, more satisfying work for our people and a more positive contribution to society. To get there though, requires a shift in focus.

Achieving impact through distinctive value

The CIPR’s definition of public relations is that it is the discipline of looking after reputation, with the goal of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour.

Reputation is influenced by many factors, including leadership and vision; knowledge and skills; emotional connection and adding value to society. Those factors will rarely be impacted by generic lightweight campaigns or tactical content but, for organisations that carry specialist expertise or knowledge, creating high quality campaigns that offer distinctive value to society really can move the dial.

We know intuitively that when consumers see generic stories (which can range from data indexes to lightweight surveys to tired tips articles), they usually don’t remember the name of the brand they are attributed to because, firstly, they could have come from anyone and, secondly, they don’t add any real value to the person consuming it, except for perhaps offering a few seconds of distraction.

Conversely, if you are clear about the value the organisation provides and to whom, you can use its specialist expertise to create breakthrough campaigns that are authentic to the organisation, while being memorable and helpful to its audience.

We recently helped Meddbase use their specialist expertise in clinical software to create a campaign showing how technology could improve patient engagement with the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme. The campaign wasn’t about generating attention for the sake of it but about providing their prospective customers with distinctive value in a way that brought to life the company’s specialist expertise. This was a business that had never worked with the NHS before but, within three months, our integrated campaign moved people quickly down the funnel, securing tangible sales to NHS Integrated Care Boards.

The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ is an interesting concept as it essentially suggests that a volume-based approach to PR is unethical. I believe that it is also very ineffective. While AI provides an opportunity for an exponential increase in content production, there is an opportunity here for the profession to shift its focus from high volume to high impact by majoring on ideas that create distinctive value. It’s an approach that is better for organisations, better for PR professionals and better for society. The real tragedy, in my view, would be ignoring it.

Chartered PR practitioner Leigh Greenwood is  the founder and managing director of Evergreen PR, a specialist healthcare PR agency that’s focused on ‘making health happen’ by delivering measurable outcomes for health organisations, establishing them as leading experts in their field and driving their priority audiences to take action.