We have read extensively in recent days of the clash between the largest Italian company, ENI, and the most accredited and feared television investigative programme, Report, by Rai3.
The story is known, and it was immediately clear from the opening of the piece: “Report has tried to reconstruct the path of what is suspected to be one of the largest bribes ever paid in the world. We are talking about a billion dollars that ENI would have disbursed for the purchase of the license to probe the seabed of the oil block called Opl245 in Nigeria”. Not a bad start. As Eni's head of communications there was something to worry about.
Eni had been invited to counter the reconstruction of the Report through closed interviews which, according to the company, were only partially reported so as not to undermine the solidity of the prosecution's structure of the investigation.
According to many observers, the case is important because it would officially accredit the Social TV, that is to say the phenomenon that integrates the big TV screen with the small one mobile devices, tablets o smartphone, allowing the public of social to interact with what is transmitted in modality broadcasting from the old television, thus reversing the ancient approach of one to many.
This phenomenon is actually already widely operating, on Twitter for all topics of political discussion, talkshows and the like, while on Facebook for all the comments relating to entertainment broadcasts: recently the excellent case of the XFactor final, but also for all the big brothers, farms, islands, castaways and so on. Both for the cases mentioned and in the case of Eni, this phenomenon numerically does not yet have dimensions comparable to the numbers of generalist TV.
However, if there is one lesson from this story that will really serve as a watershed between before and after, if not school, it is that we are dealing with a structured case of Brand Journalism highly visible in our country. Corporate communication has profoundly changed with the massive presence of millions and millions of citizens, customers, viewers, users, consumers active on social networks, while companies, even the large ones, have had a hard time adapting (some are doing it now, others not even now).
Have opened a channel corporate who can speak to tens of thousands of interlocutors in the case of companies like Eni, testifies that a strategy has been defined, a real-time management, that the channel's approach is informative, that the media is treated as such, like a real newspaper, and that when needed it can be used in the way we have seen, countering live to a very powerful media such as generalist TV, with certainly different numbers, but also making their reasons heard (and shifting the subsequent discussion of the newspapers from the merits to the case of communication..).
There has been much debate on the merits of these reasons (the company has given partial answers, defended itself without explaining, in a preconceived way..), just as it has been discussed whether the investigative format that does not accept cross-examination hides an attitude too instrumental in supporting one's theses.
But here the merit of the story is not in question; in terms of modern corporate communication, Eni was able to give the answers it did because it had previously taken care of equipping itself in the correct way by opening the channels and talking to its audience also through social.
Many other companies, not all for heaven's sake, but really many others, I think they could not have done it because they are not yet structured. Companies tell a story even if they haven't decided to do so, and the modern customer is progressively less and less willing to be targeted by a one-way flow of information, to which he cannot add or subtract anything. THE social they taught him that he can also participate in the life of a company or a brand, he can contribute to its narrative and even co-generate its reputation.
Who hasn't properly opened their corporate sui channels social and on the net, and has no professionals of the Brand Journalism to be entrusted with the task of reacting in case of need, he certainly could not have responded as ENI did. If there will be an effect from the Eni/Report case, it will most likely be in this sense: it will help to understand how the communication of a company is managed in the times of social sharing of all our lives, enabled by the web.
