The other day I had lunch with Ray Kotcher, the global CEO of Ketchum PR, and a leading light in the public relations industry. From our extremely interesting and diverse conversation I’ll touch on just one topic: whether the PR industry (or any of its participants) will grasp – or leave lying – the opportunity that lies before it. As I discuss in my recent article on the future of PR, the issue today is about reaching people who are awash in a sea of messages, coming from friends, acquaintances, traditional media, online sources, advertising, and the world at large. Advertising – which is how companies have traditionally spent money to reach their targets – is waning in influence among the flood of messages. In addition, advertising is just what it is – an isolated message to a consumer – and as such is immensely less influential than a dialogue or interaction. So, in the vast space that involves playing in the totality of the flow and interplay of information and influencing people, who will create the most value?

On the face of it, the PR industry is the best positioned to do so. Traditional media will always provide a central (though gradually smaller) share of the messages people are exposed to, and no industry other than PR has the expertise to work with the media industry effectively. As Ray put it, dealing with the media is “heavy lifting” – somethng the other disciplines don’t have the expertise to do well, don’t know how to make money at and often see beneath them. “New” media in fact has many similar characteristics to traditional media. Certainly many grievous mistakes have been made by PR firms in dealing with blogs and bloggers, but they are learning, and prominent bloggers, as key influencers in the emerging world of media, need to be communicated with in a very similar fashion to journalists. However public relations is still caught – certainly in perception and to some degree in reality – in the world of “spin”. It is difficult to get out of the habit – and clients’ expectations – of pitching stories and hype. To move from PR to encompassing the entire domain of how people are touched with information, and the sum of the influence networks, is an enormous leap. The structure of the global communications conglomerates also stymies innovation by segmenting specialties among different firms, and often discouraging direct competition. Can any of the current players in media, advertising, marketing, and PR shift into the encompassing space of meme propagation? Perhaps. The reinvention of the advertising, PR, and communications industries will happen apace over the next years. There are golden opportunities to be seized.

Since our conversation, Ray has pointed me to the commencement address he made at Boston University College of Communications, titled Join the Conversation. It’s a great piece, well worth reading, that shows that Ray really understands the forces at play here. His clearly deeply-felt admonition to “join the conversation” is the antithesis of the attitudes of corporate leaders clinging on to the rapidly disintegrating, rigid structures of yesteryear. He finishes his speech with personal advice to the students, including:

Engage your curiosity

Never forget your integrity and credibility

Develop your voice

Foster your creativity

Take with you passion

A topic of great importance – serendipity – has suddenly surfaced in public debate. William McKeen, chairman of the University of Florida journalism department, recently wrote an article in the St Petersburg Times titled The endangered joy of serendipity, suggesting that in an online world we are less likely to stumble across the vital information you aren’t specifically looking for. Steven Johnson, author of among other titles Everything Bad is Good For You, responded with a blog post Can we please kill this meme now, strongly disagreeing that online information is worse for serendipitous discoveries than print, sparking substantial debate on the theme. With the mainstream press commonly taking their stories from discussions in the blogosphere, not surprisingly the BBC took up this issue of the importance of serendipity, with a piece Serendipity casts a very wide net.

I’ve been speaking about serendipity for some years, and more specifically the concept of “enhanced serendipity”, that is, deliberately making fortuitous and valuable accidents more likely to happen. As part of the debate Nicholas Carr wrote a post expanding on the history of the word serendipity. However he missed out an important detail of the story. As Carr wrote, the word originates from Horace Walpole, who coined it from the story, The Three Princes of Serendip. The three princes, in their adventures, had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries. However these didn’t just happen to them; the princes actually helped to create them. In the following tale, excerpted from a retelling of the The Princes of Serendip by Richard Boyle, the three princes are advisors to the great Emporer Beramo.

Beramo has fallen in love with a beautiful slave girl called Diliramma, who one day questioned his honour in public. In a fit of rage, he had her bound and abandoned in a forest. The next day, Beramo was filled with remorse and ordered a search for his paramour. No trace of her was found, leaving Beramo ill with sorrow.

Witnessing the emperor’s suffering, the princes advise him to build seven beautiful palaces and to reside in each one for a week. In addition, the best storyteller in each of the seven most important cities of the empire is to be brought into his royal presence to recount a marvellous story.

Over the weeks, in his various palaces, Beramo listens with appreciation to six of the stories, his health steadily improving. While listening to the seventh story, about a ruler who spurns his lover, Beramo suddenly realizes that it concerns Diliramma and himself. On being questioned, the storyteller reveals that he knows Diliramma and that he is searching for her lord to tell him that she still loves him despite his act of cruelty. Overjoyed, Beramo sends for Diliramma and they are reunited.

In this story, the princes have created a strategy for making a happy accident more likely to happen. This is a great example of enhancing serendipity, not just being subject to it. That is what we must seek to do, in creating links between ideas and people that would be enormously valuable if only they were made. So many of the emerging technologies of today, from blogs to collaborative filtering systems such Last.FM, absolutely facilitate happy accidents.

The debate on the topic is very important. I believe that online search tools are currently at a very early stage of development, and so they are hardly likely to cut us off from accidental discoveries of relevant or interesting information any more than we have been in a print world. However we are moving closer to a time when we will be able to hone in on what we are seeking with great precision. I have previously envisaged a “serendipity dial” which we can situate either to give us great accuracy, or a greater possibility of accidents in our discoveries. I don’t share McKeen’s concerns. Most people are far more diversely informed than they were not long ago, except by choice. The tools we have are not at fault. As we move forward, we need to be highly aware of the degree of serendipity we are choosing. The new world of information gives us that choice.