Public Relations, I’d Like You to Meet Virtual World Relations
Industry Predictions
12.15.2008
Too often, public relations assumes a locality that may become limiting as our world flattens and becomes progressively more digital and virtual.
In the future, virtual online worlds will become opportune spaces where consensus grows from chaos - where people begin to incubate alternative means to govern virtual cohabitation and cooperation. As global relations, politics, economics and marketing continue to address all of our emerging challenges, it will be through online virtual worlds that we all conceive, design and iterate models that work and shape communications to realize and perpetuate what I am calling “virtual world relations” (VWR), which is a mix of PR, public affairs, marketing and design (interface, 3D, rich internet applications and virtual reality), gaming and government. Though it seems like odd bedfellows, these areas will group under PR and draw from one another.
Imagine it’s 2014. Virtual worlds are finally off the ground and are beginning to command more attention. For the first time, millions of people are able to easily co-invent, incubate, design and perpetually tweak their versions of an online world or neomony (I just made that word up). And with all these virtual worlds, PR will need to help attract people’s attention, spread the word, sell ideas and advocate new ways, all in a pure digital environment. In this respect, public relations will have successfully evolved and a handful of new VWR leaders will be setting the course for marketing, advertising and corporate communications.
Those who have fluency in persuading populations to action - who are able to design highly complex messages into easily understood and actionable snippets and who can captivate people’s imaginations - will be the ones to most easily evolve with VWR. Many will not adopt this way; they’ll take another decade to catch up. A lot of energy will be spent verbally distinguishing which world we are talking about, real or virtual, and we’ll see a lot of offline, real-world communications driving people to specific places and times online. VWR will be tasked with setting the strategies and supporting tactics that will sort this out.
Online world population will be measured and compared to real offline world population. When the population growth (user participation) in these virtual worlds begins to grow more rapidly, several de facto policies and governing ideas will catch people’s attention. VWR agencies will conduct studies to justify VWR campaign budgets that will begin to displace traditional PR budgets.
Several companies will offer subscriptions to tools that people can use to create and interact with others in their virtual universes. Banks in the real world will be used to fund upstarts in the virtual world, much as they are today. Global currency markets will slowly stabilize around a unified online currency, and VWR-oriented agencies in North Carolina, US, will accept payments from a well-funded high school club outside of Jakarta, Indonesia.
VWR agencies’ greatest challenge will be to build distinction and consensus among hundreds of millions of international users about the opportunities and governance of these virtual worlds. Agencies who have government relations in their bloodstream will take advantage as larger, traditional PR companies hastily acquire fluency in politics and diplomacy.
Academic intellectuals in the areas of problem-based learning, interdisciplinary studies, economics, IP law, government, psychology, communications/PR, international studies, design and the sciences are in really high demand as everyone blasts into an IP land grab. VWR agencies who’ve embraced integrated or interdisciplinary approaches to their work will again have the advantage.
The question here is not whether or not the world will move toward virtual environments. There is clearly too much to gain in this area, and once the tools are there, people will move in droves. The question is, “how fast will it move and will the PR industry be there to help contextualize these complex environments and make sense of it for vastly diverse populations?”
