Professional Communication and Network Interaction

A Rhetorical and Ethical Approach

Heidi A. McKee, James E. Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351770767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Retórica

Digital technologies and social media have changed the processes, products, and interactions of professional communication, reshaping how, when, with whom, and where business professionals communicate. This book examines these changes by asking: How does rhetorical theory need to adapt and develop to address the changing practices of professional communication? Drawing from classical and contemporary rhetorical theory and from in-depth interviews with business professionals, the authors present a case-based approach for exploring the changing landscape of professional communication. The book develops a rhetorical theory based on networked interaction and rhetorical ethics: seeing professional communication as involving new kinds of networked interactions that require an integrated view of rhetoric and ethics. The book applies this frame to a variety of communication cases involving, for example, employee missteps on social media, corporate-consumer interactions, and the developing use of artificial intelligence agents (AI bots) to handle online communication.

1 Introduction

Professional Communication in the Digital Age

We begin with a claim that we take as a given: Professional communication has changed dramatically in the digital age.

This is neither a new nor a controversial claim. Scholarly research, the popular press, and social media postings are replete with discussions and examples of how digital technologies have impacted all aspects of contemporary human society. From self-driving cars to automated warehouses to online shopping and virtual reality travel, digital technologies have and are transforming the processes and practices in many fields, including professional communication.¹

In all realms of professional communication, the claim that the digital technologies we use to communicate have radically altered how we communicate is not new, with these “technologies” referring to the combination of hardware (the physical interfaces of laptop, smartphone, mobile device, car dashboard, etc.) and software (the applications and programs shaping communications), and the deep infrastructure of networked connectivity (the internet and the World Wide Web and the laws and regulations shaping those systems). It is that combination of hardware, software, and infrastructure—and the particular human designs, applications, and uses of it—that has led to what the philosopher Luciano Floridi (2014) identified as a revolutionary new digital age that is not only changing how we communicate but is also changing us. Floridi (2014) saw the digital age as “the fourth revolution” in this history of humankind, a revolution that is not only changing our communication interactions but is also reshaping our fundamental sense of self, our culture, and our very “human reality.”²

Digital communications are truly global. As of 2016, over 3.5 billion people worldwide access the internet (most through the Web and attendant applications). The percentage of the population with access to and use of the internet is very high in some countries (e.g., Japan 91%, United States 88%, France 86%, Russia 71%, Brazil 66%), moderate in others (e.g., Turkey 58%, China 52%, Mexico 45%, Kenya 45%), and low or just emerging in others, often because of widespread poverty, still-developing infrastructure, government censorship, and/or war (e.g., India 34%, Uganda 19%, Iraq 13%, Sierra Leone 2%, Somalia 1%) (Internet Live Stats, 2016).

For those with access, the rise of mobile and smart, connected devices has led to a digital ubiquity—connected 24/7 at work, at home, and when travelling. In this omnipresent digital network, the boundaries between home and work, personal and professional, and private and public are becoming increasingly blurred. Our professional communications are also becoming more and more multimodal with the increased ease with which audio, video, and textual elements can be merged. We video chat and conference with each other from all over the world; company leaders need to learn not just the art of the letter and email but also of the corporate video (as so many have done to announce product releases or to apologize for corporate misdeeds).

Our computers themselves now talk to us in ways that are increasingly human-like. The rise of artificial intelligent agents in all fields, including professional communication, is remarkable, and we are in the midst of an interface revolution where computers no longer need to look or interact like computers, an issue we discuss in Chapter 7. More frequently than many people realize, our communications are occurring not just with fellow humans but also with AI agents who aim to “learn” from us and who also, as part of their programming, gather, search, and data mine our communications, delivering to individuals and corporations petabytes (and maybe even at this point zettabytes) of data. Nearly everything we say and do online is—with and without our permission—being collected, aggregated, de-aggregated and analyzed by computer and human agents. We are immersed in digital technologies that shape how, when, where, why, and with whom we communicate.

So, yes, professional communication is definitely changing, and in this book, we want to examine the claim, raising what we think are two important follow-up questions. Given that digital technologies are changing communication, then:

1 Exactly how is professional communication changing? And what difference do those changes make in terms of not only how we create, design, publish, distribute, and encounter professional communication but also how we interact in professional settings?

2 How does our thinking about communication—our fundamental rhetoric theory for professional communication—need to change to keep up with the dramatic changes in communication technologies? What frameworks will help individuals and organizations effectively analyze and produce professional communications in the digital age?

In regard to the second question, for many people, professional communication thinking, especially business communication thinking, is still guided by older rhetoric theories and ideologies from the age of print and broadcast media, or even, perhaps, from an older version of the digital realm (e.g., a Web 1.0, linear transmission model). One of our key arguments is that we need to update our fundamental framework for thinking about professional communication. Drawing from our research, which includes interviews with business professionals from a wide variety of organizations working in and with a wide variety of technologies, we build and articulate here a rhetorical/ethical network frame for analyzing and producing professional communications.

In this introductory chapter, we start by providing a few brief examples, drawn from corporate use of social media, to illustrate how communication in the digital age has changed, and reflect on what difference that makes. In the second part of the chapter, we outline the framework and describe the methodology we use to conduct this inquiry, providing an overview for the chapters that follow.

Professional Communication Practices: Some Corporate Social Media Examples

On April 19, 2013, the Ford Motor Company posted a tweet on its corporate Twitter site (@ford), praising the first responders in the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three persons and maimed 264 others. The tweet read:

To the first responders of Boston: THANK YOU. You are true American heroes. Sincerely, Ford Motor Company

The text of this tweet was layered into the foreground of a photograph of a new black Ford car and a new black Ford truck, both upgraded and detailed as police vehicles.

The public response to this tweet on Twitter was immediate and harshly critical—not so much because Ford praised the responders, which people found admirable, as because of the photograph, which showed Ford using the tragedy as a sales opportunity. The presence of what was clearly an advertisement, a billboard-like image, crossed a line in the public’s eye from appropriate to inappropriate.

The tweet was considered tasteless and inappropriate, but one marketing analyst, Augie Ray (2013), saw Ford’s mistake as more than a simple lapse, but actually an ethics issue: “Not everyone will agree, but I feel that Ford’s use of brand imagery not only reduced the sincerity of the message but demonstrated questionable ethics.” Ray went on to note that the problem could have been avoided if Ford had simply used the text without the photograph. The text itself Ray viewed as an appropriate sign of corporate support and appreciation for first responders.

The negative publicity generated by this tweet prompted Ford to get “serious” (Laskowski, 2013) about social media. Ford hired what they called a Global Digital and Multimedia Communication Manager, whose assignment was to build Ford’s social media presence in ways that would promote the company. Just a few months later, an October 2013 Boston University Today feature article praised Ford for being a corporate leader in the use of social media, noting that its Twitter site had 206,000 followers (versus General Motors, with only 91,000 followers) (Laskowski, 2013).

Hiring a “digital and multimedia communication manager” is one sign of corporate recognition that a different approach is called for, and that the old model for public relations and communication management has changed. An Oracle (2012) white paper advises businesses to create a “social contact center,” that is, a distinct organizational structure for managing social media interaction and for, as we discuss in Chapter 6, making an ethics paradigm shift to corporate listening that doesn’t simply include data-gathering from customers (the old model) but also affords opportunities to create value for customers in ways specific to their interests, priorities, and needs.

Corporations who have a presence on social media are expected to say something about bad news, natural disasters, tragedies, or celebrity deaths, but there is, for example, an art to crafting the social media condolence (d.Trio, 2016). The Ford tweet (and many others like it) have become examples of what not to do with corporate social media. But this clumsy approach to social media is by no means a rare event.

In June 2013, clothing retailer Kenneth Cole posted a tweet that seemed to be using the protests in Cairo happening at that time as an occasion to promote a spring clothing line. The tweet read:

Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bitly/KCairo-KC.

The Cairo “uproar” was a complex political and social upheaval that, unfortunately, included violence in which 16 people were killed and over 200 injured, hardly the occasion for a sales pitch, much less a joke.

Kenneth Cole had to hire a crisis management firm to deal with the flak created by this tweet, but what came out later was that the tweet was intentional (Nudd, 2013). The executive who authorized the tweet saw it as an opportunity to garner attention. He was unrepentant about posting the tweet, because, as he said:

Billions of people read my inappropriate, self-promoting tweet, I got a lot of harsh responses, and we hired a crisis-management firm. […] But our stock went up that day, our e-commerce business was better, the business at every one of our stores improved, and I picked up 3,000 new followers on Twitter. So on what criteria is this a gaffe? [Laughs] Within hours, I tweeted an explanation, which had to be vetted by lawyers. I’m not even sure I used the words I’m sorry—because I wasn’t sorry.

(Nudd, 2013, laugh notation part of original)

This executive pursued the strategy that many companies and individuals take with social media: “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”³ “Billions” of people read the tweet, Kenneth Cole stock went up that day, the executive picked up 300 new followers. Success, one might think, at least by one set of measures.

The executive’s response raises a question that we must seriously consider: In the age of social media, is it strategically smart to be outrageous and to deliberately violate standards and norms, even offend people, in order to garner attention? Is that where we ought to go with social media? Should we see “being a jerk on Twitter” (Nudd, 2013) as simply good business, maybe even as being a digital genius?

Here is an example showing how business strategy overlaps with issues of rhetoric, communication, and ethics. From the standpoint of communication ethics, you could object to the Kenneth Cole tweet because it treats people as objects to be used for one’s own self-promotion. Making a joke based on a tragic event, using people’s misfortunes to sell clothing, would strike many, if not most, as lacking empathy, ethics, integrity, and basic human decency. Tone deaf is the term often used to describe this kind of communication: a posting that fails to demonstrate sufficient awareness of and respect for people’s identities, feelings, or situations. So from the standpoint of business ethics and public relations, the strategy is questionable.

But even from a strictly bottom-line profit standpoint—the claim the executive makes—the strategy may also miss the mark: The executive measured success in terms of short-term metrics. What more substantive marketing research shows is that customers (as distinctly different perhaps from shareholders) want companies to have integrity, to tell the truth, to be good citizens, to practice social responsibility, to label products accurately and clearly, to treat employees well, to put customers ahead of profit, and to engage in ethical practices (Rooney, 2011; Ray, 2012b). Trust is a key quality, the basis for the relationship between a business and its customers. The company brand or image is key to establishing and maintaining that trust—a point we will return to in our discussion of phatic communication and ethos in Chapter 3. If you “drive traffic but harm trust” (Ray, 2012b), you are ultimately doing damage to your brand and your business ethos. Trust matters, and it matters a great deal (Edelman, 2015; Etlinger, 2015b). “Bad metrics lead to bad strategies. More than that, bad metrics can lead to unethical behaviors” (Ray, 2013).

The Kenneth Cole executive is simply wrong. In putting “buzz before brand” (Tossona, 2015), he has confused metrics with value, favoring short-term measures of attention (likes, hits, monthly sales) over long-term measures of success. The preponderance of social media marketing research seems to indicate that this is not the way to use social media. So what are some ways to use social media?

Executives in Kellogg’s Global Corporate Affairs team, including the Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs (Kris Charles), the Director of Brand Public Relations for the U.S. (Brandy Ruff), and the Senior Director of Consumer Engagement (Rick Wion), discussed in an interview with us how their company, which has operations in over 30 countries and sells products in 160, needs to be always aware of emerging news and cultural events in each of its markets so as to strategically join conversations when and where it is appropriate to do so. Unlike the spring uprising tweet from Kenneth Cole, where the company was just trying to insert their brand into a public conversation with no right to speak, Kellogg approaches their public conversation work much more carefully and, we would say, ethically.

As Brandy Ruff explained, when looking at traditional and social media and choosing what conversation to join, Kellogg first asks, “What right we have in the conversation? Is it a conversation we want to be involved in? Is it a conversation we have a true voice, purpose for?” As Kris Charles noted, Kellogg looks to join conversations “where we would have a right, relevance, and credibility on that topic because of our leadership in that area.” Rather than trying to wedge their way into every trending conversation, Kellogg focuses on key areas, such as breakfast, food sustainability, world hunger, and workplace diversity (the first topic given the founding and still primary focus of the company and the latter topics given Kellogg’s commitment to corporate responsibility). Kellogg has received awards and widespread recognition in multiple countries for their philanthropic work to ease world hunger and to build sustainable food supply systems. Committing to being an active player with a credible, relevant voice in public conversations is part of Kellogg’s corporate and philanthropic mission.

Clearly, the technologies of social media have altered expectations for company participation in public discussions and, further, the technology of social media has altered standards by creating a venue in which “consumers have higher expectations of what a corporate brand is and does—for them and for their neighbors and communities” (Rooney, 2011). In other words, corporate behavior is not as invisible as it used to be: If a corporation screws up, people will know about it—and the virality and spreadability of social media communication will make sure that everybody knows about it and talks about it and spreads the word to others. In a sense, social media has raised the bar on corporate participation in public conversations. How a company responds to those open forums is key, as our next brief example shows.

On December 19, 2011, during the holiday season, a FedEx delivery driver came up to a house with a package (containing a computer monitor, as it turned out) and threw the package over a fence onto the porch. The person receiving the package, who happened to be home, made a video of the event that he posted on YouTube, under the title “FedEx Guy Throwing My Computer Monitor.” The video very quickly went viral, receiving 800,000 views in the first week alone (Belsie, 2011) and generating a twitterstorm of controversy and criticism. Once the video went viral with millions of views, broadcast network news agencies picked up the story as well. Suffice to say, FedEx faced a major public relations crisis.

Two days after the video was posted, the company responded to the crisis, strategically posting its own YouTube video (FedEx, 2011), a video of Matthew Thornton, III, the Senior Vice President, speaking to the public. Thornton offered a public apology, and noted that the driver in the video “is not working with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Professional Communication in the Digital Age
• PART I Building a Rhetorical/Ethical Network Theory
• PART II Cases of Network Interaction
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index