Jaci Clement: Developers need to become media savvy

As appeared in Long Island Business News, July 24, 2015:

I loved Ed Blumenfeld’s commentary.

To say Long Island development is being held hostage by a vocal few, short on facts but long on opinion, is an understatement.

Now, please allow me to offer a contrarian point of view.

Long Island developers will never win until they wake up and acknowledge the world has moved on. And when the world moved on it changed the face of business. That is to say local industry in general – this criticism is not limited to real estate and development – has to wake up to the fact that they are, first and foremost, a communication company and, in this particular case, a development company second.

Historically, business has gone something like this: management decides what it wants to do. Then somewhere down the line, someone tells the company’s public relations department. Communications was viewed simply as an afterthought.

Today, thanks to technology and the public’s ability to use social media for good as easily as evil, communication is king. Look no further than today’s hottest companies and you’ll see one particular common thread: they generate buzz and know how to use it to get what they want.

They get away with it, because they give communications a seat at the decision making table where a company-wide strategy is devised to make stuff happen and, this is a really big, to get inside the community in question and become part of it.

That’s vastly different than telling someone from PR to send out a press release or attend a meeting and report back on what was said. Yet this latter scenario, sadly, illustrates exactly where Long Island industry remains stuck in the mud.

When it comes to change – any kind of change – the public wants leaders they trust. Building trust doesn’t come from merely submitting a great plan that meets zoning requirements.

Maybe the real problem with development around here is that the people involved in the game spend so much time dealing with the rules, regulations and legalities of a project that they feel at home in the court of law. But their true battle is in the court of public perception.

Continuous failure should be enough to convince an industry it’s time to get media savvy and fight back, not only for themselves but for the future of Long Island.

Clement is the CEO and executive director of Long Island’s Fair Media Council.