But the world has, in recent years, turned upside down. And the media have reached beyond becoming the messages to become the catalyst for how organizations form relationships with key stakeholders. Thanks to new media tools, the conventions of one-direction communication and transaction are distant memories. Business may no longer control how people connect. Nor can business manage how people engage. The power of building relationships has shifted, forever, to users. And communicators must learn how to use new media as catalysts for developing relationships in new ways.

Please join Mark Schumann, ABC, to explore what a communicator must be to thrive in this new communication world. He will explore beyond the new communication world that new media tools – and how people react and use them – have created. He will examine how the controlled environment once seen as an opportunity for controlled messaging is now an open communication marketplace where almost anyone can be heard, and be believed, without traditional notions of editing and vetting. And he will consider how the new media tools tap a hunger in people to connect in ways they never thought possible – to build relationships that supersede boundaries of geography or time – to create communities that reach beyond traditional limits.

Schumann will ask, candidly, how prepared are communicators to handle this change? He will examine how leaders must acknowledge this fundamental change in their business relationships with workers, investors, customers and other stakeholders. And he will explore how communicators must change to use the new “relationship” tools to advance an organization’s reputation – as a place to buy, invest and work – as well as to market an organization’s customer and employer brands.

Only if business will creatively use media as a catalyst for relationships – as Schumann will define – can it keep up with the pace of change. No longer is keeping people informed and connected as simple as sending messages or updates through one-dimensional channels. No longer is collecting feedback from stakeholders as simple as sending out surveys at particular moments in time. No longer is recruiting, retaining and engaging talent as simple as following what worked in a more predictable world. No longer is reacting to customers and investors in an earnest but passive manner good enough. Today, and in the future, the name of the game is relationships. Schumann will ask the question: Are you ready?