Communications is the critical field the world forgot about

This is a bit of a rant. I woke up salty.

First, a personal anecdote: a few years ago while adjusting to a new role with a nonprofit, some government funding became available for Indigenous-centred programming relating to digital information systems. The organization scrambled to design a new program (as they do) and ultimately succeeded in securing the funding. Because the program involved digital information systems, the marketing and communications team, which I was part of, was looped into the program design. Our team manager (a self-taught marketer who learned everything during his six years with said nonprofit) worked with the curriculum team to name the program, and "marketing" was their term of choice. At that point I had worked in communications for about 12 years and pointed out the program was actually dealing with communications, not marketing. I was ignored, which infuriated me, so I pushed harder. Every element of the program dealt with navigating flows of information; writing and narrative-building, learning distribution tools and building a tool stack, public relations – the responses from my manager were void of comprehension. I remember saying to him "communications is a whole field, I promise!". He had no idea, never having considered what the "communications" in "marketing and communications" could possibly mean beyond social media management. He finally relented and included "marketing and communications" in the program title (even though the program had nothing to do with marketing).

Over the past few years I've had to advocate for my field repeatedly. At the organization I was with, I pitched myself into more useful positions (designing the roles myself) that addressed the gaps they couldn't see, mending flows and building better systems. I initiated every team project, even while each required several iterations of presentations and charters, hand-holding leadership into understanding the work. I carried 75% of the team's annual workplan for three years. More than once they realized the person they'd contracted for tens of thousands of dollars was doing work I could have managed smoothly, but of course once they realized the value of the work and my capabilities, the tension became paying me what I was actually worth, which they were conveniently blind to.

I'm bitter. I know. If I could just let it go, I would. I don't feel the static of it every day, but my annoyance has branched into a broader frustration with the public sector and my acute awareness that we are in an existential communications crisis that no one seems to see, because no one seems to have a baseline understanding of what the fuck communications even is.

What it isn't

It isn't just "social media" and it isn't just "marketing". Let's start there, because those assumptions drive me crazy.

Before social media came along, working in communications was a dynamic, in-community role. You often met journalists for coffee, working together to parse the public zeitgeist and process it into digestible narratives.

You sifted through noise to find signals that mattered. You strategized how to build flows between multiple levels of discourse, first by meeting people where they were, then coaxing them towards beneficial, actionable understandings.

You were multi-skilled and could write in styles varying from expository (journalism), descriptive (product and technical copy), persuasive (marketing), long and short-arc narratives (content writing), reviews, and creative story-building.

You had a solid sense of empathy and intuition – the field is deeply psychological, relating directly to behavioural science and memetics.

Above all you were media-literate. Your job was understanding which information mattered, and how to distribute it effectively.

When social media came along, it took time before organizations caught on to its value as an amplification tool. While working for a community radio station, I designed an "engagement club" as a way for dedicated volunteers to easily clock hours by liking and commenting on the station's posts. It worked for everyone, and because they loved the station (yay community radio!) it was honest engagement.

I remember writing my first social media strategy in 2016, bits of which I shared on Facebook at the time:

Social media is still more or less an unknown to many public organizations, and the value of an engaged online following is only JUST being realized in many orgs' strategic plans (and barely, at that). Between rotating staff who take social media on as a sub-task, unclear messaging, and not having a system in place for measuring impact, many orgs see social media as a vague, kinda-not-really-useful tool that they'll "figure out eventually".

MEANWHILE literally everyone is plugged in, relying more heavily on our feeds for news and updates that shape how we choose to present ourselves/lives and our circles of awareness. Folks follow orgs they love on social media not for their content, necessarily, but because it shapes their online realities. We review and judge others' online circles and interests to assess where and how we fit into them, and we shape our own online presences to draw like-minded folks in. We're marketing ourselves. Personal brands are nothing new for comedians and internet personalities, but a lot of "regular" folks don't realize they've become mini-marketing campaigns for "Me". I don't have studies in front of me to back that up, but shaddup it's happening. It's how social media works.

Given how quickly we consume and share information, asking an organization, journalist, media affiliate, or politician to read and respond to a traditional media release is asking a lot. They have to read the release, negotiate how to disseminate it, and then once they find a place for it, what is the reach or impact achieved through it? If you don't get a feature in the Herald, how has all that time and effort paid off for your business/organization? How does it benefit those you're asking for hype, if at all? Media outlets are struggling too, space and resources are limited for everyone.

Social media releases are a thing, according to the google search I just did, but the ones I've seen still ask for too much. Dumping a jumble of quotes, links, RSS feeds, downloads, photos, handles, and hashtags onto a page... blah. You're still asking someone to read/disseminate for 30min to an hour, confer with their editors/supervisors, hum and haw over what to do with the info - it's still taxing on them. You're still running the risk of becoming white noise, which is where communications go to die.

So my brainwave was this: what about simply inviting everyone to a "social media scrum" - sending an invite that specifies on a specific date and time you will tweet your thing (and if you bung that tweet up by not making it legible or providing a link to more info, pls turn in your twitter password and go sit down for a while), and ask orgs, media affiliates, politicians, community pals, to simply check in and RT. The communications personnel click a button, the journalists click a button, the organizations click a button, the executive directors click a button, the mayors' assistants click a button - hooray your message is out, no skin off anyone's sack. Easy peasy. You've just leveraged a ton of neglected social media plans into a lil communications goldmine. Well done.

I implemented the strategy with the philanthropic foundation I worked for, and it was a success. Other communicator's adapted it, and while I can't claim credit for broader community use, I do think it had some influence.

Of course, little did I realize that corporate entities were having similar lightbulb moments, and it wasn't long before click-farm services were offered to corporate marketing firms, followed by bot armies programmed to do the amplification work that had previously been a mechanism of real, organic community.

Which brings me to marketing.

Marketing is an inversion of communications. In communications, the means can be conversion, while the ends are always distributed understanding. In marketing, the means are sometimes distributed understanding (mostly persuasion), and the ends are always conversion.

This is a distinction few understand, and it seems to me the world has become obsessed with conversion over distributed meaning. Discourse is now driven by ideologies and binary persuasion rather than informed perspectives and good faith exchanges.

Marketing models have swallowed communications, and our infospheres are in a crisis because of it.

Communicators are shepherds of information

Information moves a lot like livestock. I'm going to lean into this analogy, bear with me:

Communicators can play the roles of shepherds (or sheepdogs), guiding information from its source to its intended audience. Their tools, channels and audiences can be compared to gates, fences, fields and paddocks.

Shepherds of information might work for organizations and policy institutes, moving the messages of those entities into the broader public spheres through various tools and channels. Sheepdogs of information might do public relations and crisis comms, ensuring the information stays clear and on-message.

A communicator's/shepherd's toolkit includes maps (strategies), logs (documented processes, maintained contacts), rods (calls to action) and staffs (fact-checked sources). Their gateways and controlled crossings are distribution channels like newsletters, social media, blogs, press releases and media scrums. Communicators strategize which gateways and crossings lead the information most effectively to its audiences.

A herd might be moved from their home paddock (the organization generating the information) to a fenced field many acres away (audiences), but the job of a shepherd isn't to just open the paddock gates and release the flock – they attend the sheep along their journey, ensuring each little node ends up where it's meant to go.

Watch the video below and imagine each sheep is a piece of information, while the gates are channels like newsletters, social media etc. Can you see how the analogy holds?

And beyond ensuring information moves effectively from one place to another, communicators have a duty to protect the fidelity of that information too. Wolves and environmental dangers are everywhere – vigilance is a critical part of the job. If one fence fails, if disease spreads, if a predator compromises the herd, the information can become corrupted, fractured, confused, and generally won't get where it needs to go.

Social media is one tiny facet of a communicator's role – but now imagine the fields in the video above are a chaotic theme park. That's what social media is; noisy, hyperstimulating, a million gates with automated shepherds shoving herds of information into overstuffed paddocks. It's become a wildly inefficient way to engage with audiences, yet over the past decade it has completely captured the field of communications. It's extremely rare to find a communications job posting that doesn't just list social media duties, which for a seasoned communicator is soul-crushing. Such a waste of skill and resources.

AI can't replace us

About three years ago, while sitting around the lunch table at work, a conversation of AI came up and I told my executive director that marketing positions would likely be made redundant by AI within five years. Marketing is essentially about jangling keys and novel, shiny things, something AI excels at. There is formulaic logic to graphic design that can be programmed. There are colours and sentence structures that data shows can trigger emotional responses. The workflow of advertising can be triggered as soon as a product or concept is ready for market. All that's really required is repetition and pay-to-play access in the noisy spaces where users are already captive.

But communications is a critically human field; AI can't make the discernments required, it can't understand the psychological context of why some information matters more than others. AI can't feel the anxiety of audiences and translate it into meaningful, actionable understanding. It can design paddocks and automate the gates, it can generate promotions based on trending data, but it can't understand the nature of the information moving through those channels, and how that information relates to human meaning.

Marketing is a field that benefits from homogenization. Communication requires diversity of thought and critical engagement. The tension between them is growing, and automation plus marketization of community is, I think, making them increasingly incompatible.

Meanwhile our information systems are completely corroded, hijacked, flooded with misinformation and disinformation, and all anyone can seem to think to do is obediently nod at the marketing influencers telling them how to create better content. We badly need for businesses and organizations to not only understand what communications as a field even is, but for communicators themselves to shake off this marketized fog of complacency.

If you work in policy, AI ethics, renewable energy, or municipal government, you need a seasoned communicator who understands the role beyond social media.

We have a duty here, friends. We are not marketers. We are communicators. We are badly needed, and we are failing.

Communications operates as a web of resonance. It requires a network of thought, comprehension and care. The challenge to communicators now is to actually grasp the field they claim to be experts within, find each other, coordinate, and start cleaning up these messy, dirty-ass infospheres.