Technology and the pandemic: five comms considerations

This is a joint blog post with André Labadie. For more briefing papers and regular email updates from Brands2Life, drop us a line and we’ll get you on the list.

This post is less about the tech mitigation measures for Covid, and more the broader implications of the current crisis for those of us working in marketing for or with technology businesses.

First up: what has the current context changed for us?

Of course, there is opportunity – technology has been pivotal in enabling remote working, distance learning, connecting individuals, families and communities, connecting healthcare and e-government and in reshaping business models to cope with the current reality.

Almost all organisations were already on a path to digital transformation; a gradual change process with many obstacles and uncertainties as yet unmapped. And yet with Covid, the obstacles have been demolished. There has had to be a massive acceleration in digital transformation; be that in enabling remote working for staff or creating new services that meet the need of a customer set in a different context. After all, without the high-performance compute, storage, cloud and connectivity technology we have today - capturing, sharing and making sense of data across the globe - we couldn’t have tools like AI supporting our response in any meaningful sense.

Speaking of our response, of course technology is playing a major role in the Covid-response itself, including 3D printing PPE, using distributed computing to find a treatment for the virus, delivering billions of pounds of support through the rapidly assembled job-retention scheme website which went live in just a few weeks, enhancing clinical care, through to symptom monitoring and contact tracking and tracing. Technology, so frequently under fire from consumers to regulators in recent times, has become more critical to humans, businesses, governments and society than ever in this crisis.

But there is also a corresponding threat – if technology doesn’t deliver on its promises, people get frustrated. Virgin Media’s recent large scale outage being one case in point. If tech comes up short whilst people are more reliant on its services, it faces greater challenges and increased scrutiny.

This is a pivotal moment for technology’s role in society – we cannot go back to a world before all of this, and indeed only 9% of Britons want to get back to where we were. Tech is going to have an even more profound role in our lives.

So what does this all mean for us, the comms leaders and communicators tasked with supporting these organisations?

We have been percolating some initial thoughts which we’ll flesh out in more detail in the coming weeks.

Five key implications:

1. Privacy and security will undergo ever greater scrutiny. Look at the challenges Zoom and Microsoft have both faced around the security of their conferencing platforms, particularly as they suffered from attacks in school and community contexts. Brands need to put their front foot forward in terms of communicating around what they’re doing here, what the limitations are and when they’ll address them. Even as Covid has exposed flaws, brands have had to put their hands up, accept responsibility and react. Arsenal Football Club has had to respond quickly to changing threats brought on by Covid, for example, and Zoom itself has worked fast to apologise and improve the security of its platform. Covid presents an opportunity to relook at how they deal with threats, and the smart ones may want to bring their audiences on the journey towards a more robust and proactive security strategy by telling the story of how they’re getting there.
2. Tensions between connectedness and mental health will increase – if you are always on, how do we ensure the industry supports those who need to switch off? Managing ‘down time’ – off screen – will be important. Should productivity app providers update their calendaring software to prevent people booking back-to-back meetings, for example? Or to make it easier / the default setting – to schedule meeting in 20 minute chunks instead of 30 minutes? Should they be leading the conversation about how we help people manage their home working lives and beyond? This is about more than mindfulness apps in the workplace, though there’s a place for those. It’s about how fundamentally technology companies should engage in and lead the discussion, acknowledging that downtime is as much a PART of your productivity as the rest of it.
3. Organisations need to decide between the urgent vs. the important. When under pressure of crisis, things are rarely done and delivered in the right strategic manner. There will be a reckoning at some stage, when we need to assess if we have delivered new software and services, for example, in the right way. Look at the discussion around privacy and contact tracking apps – are we willing to sacrifice privacy to tackle this crisis? History may well judge this to have been the right decision, but we will need to manage the consequences. People may be happy to give up a lot now to accelerate a return to normal life, but how will they feel in 18-24 months’ time? What will have broken that we can’t unbreak?
4. Clarity in technology communications has become even more important. French mathematician and writer Blaise Pascal once said (loosely translated and truncated): “I didn’t have time to write you a shorter letter.” Simplicity in messaging is so important; but for so long in tech communications we’ve been more comfortable with white papers than with soundbites. In a world where everything is getting boiled down to three word/keyphrase mantras, technology firms need to spend the time required to shift their positioning and messaging to be accessible and clear in a changed world. After all, if our Covid mitigation strategy can be boiled down to “test, track, trace, isolate” we have to do better with our corporate positioning. And then, of course, we will have more success drawing people into our long form content.
5. Technology’s place in society is still under review. Whilst tech is undoubtedly more relevant in a transformed world in many regards, in others the dynamics will change. If we face a global recession with less money in the economy as a whole, will labour costs drop? This is what Cambridge economics and politics professor Diane Coyle speculated on the Talking Politics podcast episode ‘Lockdownnomics’ – low cost labour may disrupt the automation imperative that has driven so much enterprise technology. What if a significant amount of resource is directed into healthcare – what does that mean for other sectors? Thinking through these implications, engaging with the government and industry as we work through them, will be critical for future technology influencers. As will tweaking our positioning to fit the reality of the where the market is.

The imperatives

Each of these implications may well inform a future post. There’s a broad set of issues and opportunities emerging for the technology community from this crisis.

Whilst not everything will change – and in many regards nothing will – the things that matter to people through a pandemic and then a recession will require nuance and potentially a rethink over the fundamentals of the offer and the message to the market.

So, we must plan for the detail. How can we abstract complex technological principles down to the better, clearer messaging we need to gain impact?

We must plan for the consequences of our action today. Change is happening fast but because there is desperation, due diligence isn’t happening with as much rigour as it should – viz tax, compliance, security, privacy. These checks and balances will come when people remember the techlash we’ve been going through in the last few years.

We must build for the long term knowing that changes will need to happen even more often, and even more rapidly. If you have to rush a service out the door next week that you know will be limited, make it a best effort and engineer it in a way that allows for iteration. Use microservices, open platforms, standards and agile development frameworks to let you move from version one to version next with a minimum of fuss. The tech understands that good is the enemy of perfect, and that it’s OK to get things wrong as long as we plan for it and communicate accordingly.

We’d be interested in your reflections as you look back at your business and how it and your customers are thinking about this crisis. Let us know in the comments.