The future of communications is nothing if not vibrant, but transformative shifts in storytelling, thought leadership, earned media and technology bring significant implications for Asia's corporate communications leaders. 

New research from WE Communications brought this home to a select group of in-house leaders in Singapore last week, exploring what these changes mean for their long- and short-term strategies.

The study, presented by WE international planning director Sophia Brockman, covered a range of pivotal trends that are reshaping how brands engage with various stakeholders. When it comes to brand storytelling and thought leadership, for example, hyperlocal content continues to rise, while B2B brands and ESG campaigns, alike, are becoming more relaxed and playful.

The future of earned media is always an area of specific interest for comms pros, with the report finding complexities emerging thanks to rising government censorship and the continued shift away from traditional news sources. In their stead, social journalists are redefining public discourse, even as news avoidance and fatigue becomes a pressing issue.

All of that, of course, is without mentioning the AI and digital trends that remain integral to any discussion of the future comms landscape. The study expects audio and podcasts to continue their accelerated growth, for example, alongside the continued rise of influencers and co-creators. 

To examine these issues in further detail, PRovoke Media partnered with WE to convene a Roundtable of marketing and communications leaders. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Participants

  • Azmar Sukandar, head of communications & society, Diageo Asia-Pacific

  • Keith Morrison, director, regional marketing & communications, Black & Veatch

  • Sarah James, head of communications, Asia, Sun Life 

  • Nikhil Kharoo, global head of PR & partnerships, Razer 

  • Tracy Lui, senior assistant director, marketing and communications, Mount Faber Leisure Group

  • Umesh Nair, communications & CSR director, Alstom 

  • Yeelim Lee, global head of communications, Tanoto Foundation  

  • Nitin Mantri, executive MD, WE Communications Asia-Pacific

  • Daryl Ho, MD, WE Singapore

  • Stephen Robertson, CEO, Watatawa

  • Arun Sudhaman, editor-in-chief, PRovoke Media (moderator)

The rise of social journalists
"We're definitely feeling that social supremacy trend manifesting in different ways" — Keith Morrison, Black & Veatch
 The trend of social journalists is a growing phenomenon that reflects broader shifts in the media industry of information sharing and consumption in the digital age. One-third of adults under 30 now use TikTok regularly as a news source, a 255% increase since 2020 that has overtaken X/Twitter. For our Roundtable participants, this is a profound shift.

Nikhil Kharoo (NK): I think it impacts my industry more than any because we deal with a lot of Gen Zs and Alpha. I've seen the rise of what we call tech tubers or social journalists becoming much more powerful. I think the challenge is, do they know how powerful they are? Because they don't come with the traditional skill sets of journalists. While we continue to focus on traditional mainstream and media journalists, there's at least a 50:50 mix of new age journalists coming up, who come from social platforms because we can see a very clear impact on the business as well. The moment we do something with these guys around the launch, we see our sales numbers. The only challenge is it's a very unorganized and cluttered space where everyone with a microphone and a camera comes up and does content. 

Keith Morrison (KM): As a high consideration B2B company, you probably wouldn't automatically think it would hit our industry as much, but we're definitely feeling that social supremacy trend manifesting in different ways. Having a good internal social advocacy program, having thought leadership from our execs, is driving traffic. The 'micro' thought leader is very much something that we could employ. We also find it very difficult to identify journalists, we find it very difficult to identify social influencers. We're just finding it very hard to communicate through earned media. We see earned media really as a brand halo type thing. You get one or two big pieces, but the real work is mainly through social and then also direct channels and so on. 

Umesh Nair (UN): We're seeing something similar. The barrier to entry in these conversations has been education and awareness about what a business does in that space. When it's highly technical, you would obviously have less people who have an opinion about it. So we end up amplifying our own channels and our own strategies as a primary mode of communication because that to us actually helps our business objectives in many ways as well. There are not many influencers, not many journalists would understand the depth of engineering, what goes on behind the scenes. As a B2B or B2G company that we are, everyone has to bless everything that goes out. What that means is it is easier for us to engage our audiences directly as a brand, use our own communication, our own channels, and then cultivate advocacy with the knowledge that we have, which often is very difficult because it's technical topics. Depth is required and nurturing someone from outside is not something that is as easy as it looks. 

NK: Our audiences, they're consuming news on TikTok and they're consuming news on social platforms. Traditional media, in general, has not been trained to deliver news on those platforms. That's why these new age social storytellers who come up, they resonate much better. And that's why you see numbers with some of these tech tubers or social influencers, are as much as 10 times more than a traditional big media outlet. I meet a lot of candidates, young people who come and say their source of news is Instagram. I get worried when they say that. That also tells me what my audience is reading. Earned media right now is in a bit of flux, whether they understand that shift or not. 

Daryl Ho (DH): The other complexity is speed, right? Traditional comms has never been built to be agile first. Today, with social media, you see a lot of journalists turn out for your media launches and they're typing and it goes out in social media before they get out. Is that a challenge internally as well, because I can imagine the structure and processes have to change too. Approvals maybe have to change. 

UN: I don't think speed is a concern with brands. There are a lot of stakeholders who have to validate what you're saying. I think that part is missing when it comes to an influencer or a social personality. As an individual you can pick up a phone and type whatever you want, but as an organization you uphold yourself to certain values, responsibilities, which you want to maintain. And I think that comes as a top priority as compared to speed. We would be OK to go slightly late, but we don't want to go out and say something which is not aligned with our values, with our principles and what we hold ourselves up to. That to us is far more important than speed. 

Azmar Sukandar (AS): I think that that point on aligning of values is really crucial for us at Diageo in who we work with in terms of social influencers. And I don't think we look at it quite like social journalism. Our brand communication is very different from corporate comms, I think corporate communication as an organization, as a company, how we address investors and that sort of stakeholder is still very much through traditional media. But I think how the brands go out to consumers and how we're looking at building brands or building segments of category of spirits as we call it, has definitely shifted towards culture as a way to reach people. We do have very strict guidelines because we're highly regulated and it's super important for us that we do not target the wrong age group. That, I think, is some of the risk with social platforms and channels because we would rather not use a channel rather than get into the risk of having someone underage be exposed to the marketing because that's just not right. But there's also regulation around it and it's very strictly embedded in our ways of working.

So having said that, who we work with is quite crucial in terms of influencers. We've even had some of our brands where we've gone culture first where there's not been any sort of traditional media. And what we've seen is then you have to find the right partners to be able to identify the influencers because maybe your traditional comms partners might not be the ones to be able to give you that information. We've also become partners with people more specialized in that space, to be able to recommend and suggest who could you potentially work with. It's worked really well in a lot of instances because we've taken that extra time to kind of vet through and then cultivate and spend time to bring people in to understand the product and to understand our culture.

Sarah James (SJ): We're in a highly regulated media environment here in financial services. Our communications are highly controlled, needing internal legal and compliance, and sometimes regulator approvals on the things we put out. So we're sitting there with complex products and an audience that also in Asia often has low levels of financial literacy. We've got a huge insurance gap and one of the biggest barriers is financial literacy. We need to educate and previously that would have been through traditional media. What we're seeing with the consolidation of newsrooms, we no longer have personal finance journalists, we no longer have insurance specialists. You've got business reporters who are just focused on markets and we end up with general reporters covering our beat a lot of the time. 
 
So it's definitely a challenge. And we also see on the risk side, when market conditions change, there's a lot of misinformation out there as well on social media, which you can't ignore when it reaches a certain point. In this environment we are shifting our engagement to about 50% traditional media and probably 30% social and non-traditional media engagement and then 20% our own channels. We're definitely looking at influencers — who are those social journalists that we need to get in front of, connecting with them, educating them. We are trialling in some markets a "squad" of millennial influencers that are talking about their own life goals and financial needs and doing the work around educating on financial literacy in ways that the audience understands because they're connecting on that level. It's challenging for us, but we've definitely got to adapt. If you don't, you're not going to be successful because the foundation of our business growth is around financial literacy and education and the environment's changed. 

Yeelim Lee (YL): For us, we are not trying to sell anything. There's no product that the foundation has that we're trying to push out. And the majority of the work is really around just maintaining a reputation and building trust with our stakeholders who tend to be government, other development agencies and partners. So when you are thinking about that, mainstream media is not that much of a focus for us. You've got niche media which still falls into traditional media, which is really key. Your third sector, NGO type media, they're the ones that decision makers from UNICEF or the World Bank are going to read. And then when you think about influencers, it's almost non-existent for us. We don't really engage influencers. So when you think about the audience that you're trying to engage with and the channels, I think from sector to sector that can vary. 

Nitin Mantri (NM): There's an influencer opportunity there. We work with a foundation in India when they're doing a program on women empowerment and we are using some influencers now to make people aware that there is a program existing which they can join or take advantage of. 

The changing nature of influence "You don't book Taylor Swift for everything" — Azmar Sukandar, Diageo
 The comments from Roundtable participants reflect the changing nature of influence, away from traditional gatekeepers towards — perhaps — a more democratised, dispersed model. That kind of shift does not affect earned media alone, bringing significant implications for the nature of thought leadership — which the report found is moving out of the C-suite.

YL: At the moment we are trying to build subject matter experts in Indonesia and China. People who really know the sector — we go out and try and talk to journalists or develop content with these subject matter experts. But what we'd get is push back from journalists saying, 'no, we want to talk to the family members, we want to talk to the top people.' So I agree that thought leadership should come from different wider voices. We've got this position of trying to celebrate the philanthropy, not the philanthropist — but it still feels like a lot of people want to talk to the philanthropists to really get their perspective.

NK: While we are a big organization, we are still very founder led and the founder has pretty much been the face of Razor. But what we've been doing is putting a lot of other people in front of media, social media because our audience is pretty young. A lot of young product marketers — they connect well with the audience that they're talking to. For those strategic opportunities, we still get [our founder] to tell the story, but making multiple people talk and represent the brand and not making it very power-centric is a shift that we are definitely seeing. And it's also an engineered shift I would say that we are going through now.

AS: For us it's more choiceful. You have your president or your CEO, but you don't use them for everything because it's not necessarily appropriate and they are super busy. We think of our whole array of execs almost like talent. Who's open to do what? You don't book Taylor Swift for everything, you're not going to, so how do you then look at it? And then it also creates that aura — I think of it is a special moment when you get to speak to the CEO.

And, at the same time, also looking at audiences and platforms. Which platforms are better and make more sense to have X types of spokespeople. For example, for LinkedIn, just for our employer brand — we have a group of APAC ambassadors who are all colleagues, they're all employees and they're in different locations. Most are themselves on social media. Then we work with them to help them develop that ability to be able to talk about what they want to talk about on social media in a way that's authentic to them but also is very linked to our culture. Then off they go and they do videos, we do specific things with them formally, but there's a lot of informal stuff that they have access to and talk about. You are also building talent internally of people who can talk about what they do in an articulate way and talk about the organization in a way that resonates with them and hopefully with others that you want to attract or talent you want to retain and build.  

KM: To some degree, mistakes are going to happen and you have to manage some of the outcomes. It's how you manage a different risk and then adjust to it. 
"We are able to bring an outside in perspective, which is not as easy as it seems" — Umesh Nair, Alstom
 NM: It's a culture shift for some organizations. A rising consumer electronics company was taking significant market share from an incumbent market leader in India. They were always fronting young, gen Z people when they launched a new phone etc. The incumbent started doing the same. But to get them to do it, it took them more than a year to get that culture shift within the organization to say, okay, now I need to have a young person from my R&D team to actually showcase the features of the phone. It cannot be the CEO. That culture change was tough.

UN: We've seen something very interesting in our organization as well. The role of a communicator has ended up being on two fronts. One is to build a platform that can actually surface these influencers. You're able to put certain evaluation criteria which would meet objectives. Then it automatically comes up where people are passionate about something and you're able to see as a communicator what skills these people hold. The second part is I think communicators have a very, very unique skill of supporting people who have the right passion and who have the authenticity in what they actually do. And all of us are able to see if someone's really passionate and we are able to see the potential of that person becoming an ambassador or an advocate for an organization. I haven't seen that commonly across different functions within an organization. 

Not everyone can see the same way that we see things because we are able to bring an outside in perspective, we are able to see what's more important for an organization. We are able to find that common link and a shared belief between an individual and organization and an audience, which is not as easy as it seems. Of course, it comes with its own risk. You cannot control what they do in future and how they would act in future. But I think it's a trade off that you can live with.

SJ: We still take a very strategic approach. We've got people who own certain topics, they're the subject matter experts and then you're evaluating the opportunity against your top spokesperson or someone more junior. But what we are trying to do internally from the social media perspective, is create a network of culture ambassadors. We want our employees to be out there showcasing our culture and why it's a great place to work on social media and we're creating ambassadors and training for them to do that. You can do that in a more controlled way because you've got core content that's being shared with their own perspectives on it. It's taking that segmented approach to the audience and what you're trying to do. We're trying to target prospective employees on social media with our own employee network.

Tracy Lui (TL): Similar to SMRT, where I know you've seen the ads of people who work through the night to keep you safe and make sure that your ride goes smoothly. We have very senior and experienced technical people that have been at the company since day one. What we do is try to profile them as well because the cable car is a product, but we want to show the people behind it keeping you safe. That safety message needs to be continuously communicated.

That's something that we try to use on our own platforms and when there's interview options as well. They may not speak the best English. They're not comfortable in front of cameras, but it's our job to make them so and prepare them. Because safety is so critical as a key message, we have to be extra careful but still not make it look manufactured. Still authentic, true to them as a person who's worked the company for so long. What we do also is get Gen Z to interview the very senior person and then try to create content that works on LinkedIn as well as on Instagram and Facebook. 

Channels & crises
"Sometimes I think it's a platform centric approach to crisis as well now" — Nikhil Kharoo, Razer
 WE's study also finds a 'Wild West' in terms of channel strategy, thanks to the emergence of niche, closed social networks like Discord and Strava — operating alongside the major social platforms and traditional media. For communicators, this raises questions about how their traditional content and crisis playbooks evolve to keep pace with less transparent corners of the digital ecosystem.

KM: If you can't monitor it then you shouldn't be on it. But then how do you find stuff that's out of your control that impacts your brand? The rise of social listening tools even for a B2B company is very important. Can we spot potential issues emerging using AI? We do that. 

UN: Social listening is one of the key things that everybody's doing. We do work with Discord in a couple of markets in Asia. They also have big issues on the policy and regulatory side which impact them, which can play up quite quickly. So that is also a big challenge. Monitoring is one part, but also understanding which issue can blow up and become a larger issue tomorrow. It's hard. It's very hard. Unless you have your moles in each community.

KM: If you think back to when social media first came around, it was like suddenly you would access little conversations that were happening in the bar, but you would never walk up to a person at the bar and say, 'sorry, what did you say about my company?' Sometimes it's just too much information. So if it's on Discord, it's in that environment, maybe that's OK for the moment until it becomes bigger. You have to know when it becomes bigger and spot when it's going to become big.

Stephen Robertson (SR): We work for a lot of clients in complex industries and based on this discussion, I think about 80% of our work is what I would call 'explaining in context'. We're in the context business now. When you're in that mode, you develop a resilience and you start to run towards your issues and your complexities. There's threads of that culture in a lot of the discussion here. When it does get to social media, those decisions become a lot easier because you've trained yourselves and you're much more aware. Many of us as consultants, you don't come to us for strategy very often now — you're very confident in your own corporate strategies. But you do want your consultants to be advocates to help you with explaining and help you with context to almost build that issue resilience so that those decisions that Nitin was talking about are much easier to make.

NK: Sometimes the crisis is limited to a platform, but it's still a crisis. When you talk about Discord, it might not make it to media, but it has an impact on our business. Recently we launched a feature which gave an unfair advantage to gamers and we were very proud of it, by the way. People call it cheating, but technology, if you don't move forward, you will always be standing. But the issue became really big within the community, Discord or Reddit. But because journalists don't understand what the issue was, they can't report beyond a point. But we still needed to address it.

Sometimes I think it's a platform centric approach to crisis as well now, which is very important because there's a different audience. It's not necessarily your traditional journalist who's writing about it, but at the end of the day it's still your users. The thing about a platform like Discord, Reddit or others is these are the most vocal users of your brand. So you can't just let them not be heard or spoken to, especially in a category like ours. What's happening right now is also the speed — because if someone has put a camera in front of you and you said something wrong, you can't be late. I see that more and more. I see that happening where people are not being trained in general to be talking on podcasts.

AS: I think everyone, all brands, has to have some kind of platform strategy. We've all heard about the echo chambers that are being created. The algorithms are always serving up the same old content. If you are not there actively doing something to retaliate against that, there's always going to be a certain bias or a certain perception of your brand and your reputation. Regardless of whether you want to be on it or not, if people are talking about you on there, you need to have some kind of structure, whether that's to engage or just reactively monitor or whatever it might be. I don't think any brand today can just say we don't want to engage in platforms or to even think about the platforms.