1.1 Background
The field of public relations study goes back to around 1900 with the establishment of the Publicity Bureau. Many academics consider this to be the first big step towards actually documenting the process of how to perform effective relations between organizations and stakeholders. Although earlier efforts at various forms of public relations existed, this was the first step to officially establish it as an academic field.
World War II led to the mass development of propaganda between belligerent countries. Once the war finished, these new experts moved into the private sector. This ushered in the beginning of corporate public relations as a profession in itself. With this movement came the beginning of trade associations, public relations agencies, public relations magazines, and official academic study of the subject.
Following this, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger released another piece of literature, called„The Cluetrain Manifesto.‟ At the time, it seemed controversial for its views predicting the future of public relations linking to social media. However, it was proven valid just seven years later in 2006, as the full might of the internet age came to bear its power. This manifesto was a collection of 95 theses put together into one document describing how businesses must adapt and change their public relations style to the new Internet age. (Levine, 2009)
Although there have been many papers on public relations since these pieces of literature, there is still room for improvement. Public relations itself is a very wide-open field and until 1984 had no clear direction. With the coming of the Internet heralding many new methods of communicating with stakeholders, there will surely be more significant papers to come. Grunig himself has made a few attempts to update his work in
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order to accommodate the social media boom. A major work that he created is an article called “Paradigms of Global Public Relations in an Age of Digitalization.”This paper delves further into techniques to improve communications and strategies for public relations using computer sources of technology.(Grunig, 2009)
Although these papers tend to cover very broad ranged strategies and subjects, they still give a general guideline towards how to properly handle a company‟s public image. There is a new facet of public relations that has yet to be significantly covered, yet is very relevant to the business world:how to respond to hacking scandals. There have been countless examples in the past decade of companies losing important vital information due to advanced hackers (or even sometimes simple mistakes or lack of foresight in IT structural defenses). Certainly, the best way to avoid the question of how to deal with stakeholders in the case of a hacking scandal is to increase defenses to the point that they do not occur. However, this is not always possible and if it is, is prohibitively expensive. The pace of technology is also occurring at a breakneck pace.
With some hackers being at the forefront of this technology, preventing them from accessing some systems is nearly impossible. This begs the question of how to respond to hacking incidents from a public relations perspective. It would behoove all major companies to have backup plans for if and when these events take place.
Another form of hacking, although having occurred for several decades, is much less popular. Some hackers break into systems just for the sake of being able to do so.
Their motivations are multiple but this style of hacking does not end up in monetary gains. This is a whole other challenge to deal with. Oftentimes these hackers are motivated simply by hacking the „unhackable.‟ When a company states their software or servers are untouchable, this has frequently led to an increase in hacking attempts, simply because of bragging rights for the hacker that successfully completes their mission. It seems that building up defenses against Internet hackers is a double-edged sword. By publicly stating that a company has an extra-ordinary level of security invites the most advanced hackers to break into their systems.
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One such example of these styles of attacks is in the Internet protocol (IP) camera industry. This is a relatively new type of product that only in recent years has become popular. The industry is too infantile for many studies to have been performed on it, especially relating to hacking events.Furthermore, if hacking incidents from the last two years are an indication of the future of this industry, all IP camera companies will need to brace for not only hacking attempts, but also with how to deal with the blowback from the worst case scenario of actually being breached. The previous frameworks for public relations when discussing IP cameras specifically needs to be approached and modified to effectively minimize problems after hacking events occur.
1.2 Goals and Objectives of the Research
The goal of this research is to present an alternative framework specifically for dealing with choices in public relations pertaining to IP camera hacking incidents. Public relations is a vast field with many different aspects to it. Most major research has presented somewhat generic theories and frameworks for how to deal with the many aspects of the area. Being able to have more information and knowledge on how to react when specific events occur is thus a valuable addition to the field of public relations research. This paper hopes to be able to present a viable framework for IP camera companies to utilize in case their products and infrastructure is hacked or exposed.
The research makes use of the „4 models of public relations‟ by Grunig. The updated research of Grunig, “Paradigms of Global Public Relations in an Age of Digitalization.” as well as the „The Cluetrain Manifesto‟ are both examined and analyzed to extract the more valuable aspects that pertain to this thesis‟ topic.
The research asks:
What strategies should a company employ in the case of an IP camera product being hacked in order to attain the lowest possible damage from the negative public response of the incident?
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