Communication Trends 2024
Six things I'll be keeping an eye on...
Happy new year everyone!
This will be an interesting year for communication. 2022 and 2023 was full of disruptive forces - new AI interfaces and applications blew our minds, platforms rose and fell, and there was increasing pressure for communicators to adapt to shifts and adopt novel approaches.
Here are six things I’ll be watching this year…
1. AI’s Short Term Impact
When reflecting and discussing with my fellow communicators and very much inspired by Dr Anamaria Dutceac Segesten (who wrote a piece for this newsletter a few years ago on a little known project called OpenAI that had just released a complex language model called GPT-3), I will be looking for patterns in the ways communicators start to apply AI in their day-to-day work.
An issue for many communicators - particularly those in institutional and political settings - is that the unstable ground upon which AI sits. Many are concerned about rushing into use AI before their organisations clarify a responsible approach to it. They are concerned about issues like reputational risk (this year a right wing political party was exposed for fabricating images with models of diverse ethnic backgrounds) and copyright (I recommend Diarmaid Mac Mathúna’s piece touching on this theme in AI video creation for this newsletter).
I’ll be watching to see where people are more comfortable being early adopters in this area.
Efficiency gains seem to be tempting for many. Acting as the human oversight while they get AI to draft content, analyse data, summarise content and more. Others are interested in using AI to make their organisations more responsive - e.g. setting up a chatbot to better deal with your community or using it to draft correspondence.
I suspect a big one for the EU communications environment is multilingualism. Many of the communicators I spoke with work in environments where they either need to reach across borders or to linguistic minorities within their countries, cities and communities. While the quality is not uniform across languages, its often enough to give a good first draft.
Remember: Your job won’t be taken by AI, but it will be taken by someone who uses AI.
2. More Strategic Reflection
According to the WPP Leaders’ Report on the evolving future of communication, only 56% of government communicators say they have a clear communication strategy and only 67% say they know the top priority communication objectives are for their organisation. Good strategy - whether in government, civil society or private sector - grounds communication in your policy agenda. It uses communication to achieve policy goals and applies communication resources where they can make the most difference.
Over the past few years of “perma-crisis”, sitting down to define and clarify a communication strategy seemed like a luxury not many could afford. However, in a bumper election year with new parliaments, governments and commissions on the horizon, many will need to sit down to realign their communication activities with updated policy agendas.
Incidentally, helping your organisation develop its policy communication strategy is a speciality of Moylan Communications - so if you’re considering making your communication more efficient and focused, feel free to get in touch!
3. Fragmentation of Platforms
Facebook went out of fashion and Twitter filled up with fascists. Mastodon went extinct and BlueSky took flight. We feasted our eyes on Instagram and TikTok feasted on our data. Many retreated into closed environments and a few of us even went outside.
Everyone is looking for the next big thing. My advice: Don’t waste too much energy on it. Accept that the online world is now a bit more chaotic and fragmented. Just hold fast to the good principles that have always served you as a communicator - go where your audience is, build communities across platforms and channels, and focus your resources where you make the most impact.
This will mean doing a little more research and thinking a little harder about the platforms you dedicate resources to. There are alternatives to committing fully to an account on every platform - for example, testing the ground with influencer marketing, partnerships with other organisations, and cultivating owned media like podcasts or newsletters*.
Online influence is just a bit more difficult for now.
*inevitable changes in platform preferences was part of the reason I set up this newsletter in the first place!
4. “Closed” Online Spaces
During a conversation with Katarzyna Kowalewska earlier this week, we discussed how the move to more closed environments online was becoming ubiquitous. One might be forgiven for thinking that there is less engagement these days - after all, it’s harder to get people engaging with your posts, right? The reality however is that global engagement isn’t dropping, it is in fact public engagement that is going out of style.
People have been retreating into closed online spaces, like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord. These allow for more intimate and free exchanges. We have seen many platforms try to meet this desire. WhatsApp now has the option of opening channels. Facebook has long been focusing on groups. Instagram launching broadcast channels too.
This makes sense from the perspective of the platforms of course. If people want to communicate with their friends by direct message, it’s only natural to give organisations and brands a chance to connect with people where they are - and deliver information to users in the way they want to receive it.
This opens up a whole range of new questions for communicators to answer. In the coming year I’ll be watching how people get access to, connect with people, monitor conversations and measure success in these spaces.
5. Deeper data applications
We have passed the point where your communication team should have developed a data strategy. It should have details on what data it needs to collect, how it will store and handle it, how it will make sense of it and the ways it will be applied. However, many policy communicators are anxious about the gap between them and their commercial counterparts.
Most communicators I’ve spoken with are comfortable doing some internal reviews - looking at content performance and taking lessons from that - but many have yet to go further. This year there is a move towards refining approaches.
From a communication perspective, taking data applications beyond your own communication materials - into the realms of audience analysis, profiling, etc. - will allow a communication team to get real insight to update and sharpen their approaches. When paired with behavioural insights (widely applied in the context of COVID), there is the potential for another level of communication impact.
From an organisational perspective, communication teams can use monitoring and listening capabilities to inform the political and strategic functions of their organisation. Half of communication is listening - and doing so is critical to closing the loop that will allow communication to influence and improve policy.
6. Diversity and Inclusion
If your policy affects a particular group in society, a communication team should endeavour to have them represented i`n their communication. This is as true for the public communicator, as it is for the civil society organisation, as it is for the association that aims to represent their interests.
What this looks like is working with marginalised talent, developing plans to connect with communities that would otherwise be neglected by your communication, and importantly, very importantly, listening to and reflecting on the needs of those communities. However, communication cannot do it all. In the absence of meaningful policies that take a diverse set of communities into account, communication risks being at best a meaningless decoration, and at worst it risks being misleading - and this generates reputational risk.
One thing is for certain in this context: fail to engage with this concept now and you risk being left behind. Building a culture of diversity and inclusion within governance or any policy-focused organisation will make your communication richer, more meaningful and more impactful.
And it also happens to be the right thing to do - what’s not to like?