Global PR Blog Week 1.0

PR To Be Put In Control of New Blog Brand Threat

July 14, 2004

Global PR Blog Week Day 3: PR To Be Put In Control of the New Blog Brand Threat

The Speed of Disruptive Messaging via RSS and Blog Pings are Changing the Rules of Engagement in the World of Micro Communications

Customers are actually starting to talk back to company brands through blogs (just as Cluetrain Manifesto authors, Doc Searls, Chris Locke, and David Weinberger predicted they would). One way of looking at the threat and why marketing techniques like “Brand Journalism” are arising is, as Elizabeth Albrycht of Corporate PR agreed, through the lens of political economy or power. "In the past, the company controlled communications. PR departments and employee relations (all backed by brand messaging) existed to spread the company vision. And, at the same time, these messages would assert the power of the corporation and its brands."Today, new technologies (such as blogging and RSS feeds) interrupt that power structure and its brand messages. Rather than being a technology of control (the press release, the corporate meeting, the annual report), blogging is a technology of un-control. On her blog, Albrycht said, "Blogging is one of those new technologies that makes the negotiations about power visible, vs. hiding them in a black box. Power needs secrecy and control to survive." Blogging threatens the power of brands and their message control because blogs facilitate open dialogues with customers. Or, as the Amazon review of Cluetrain Manifesto said, "In their view, the lowly customer service rep wields far more power and influence in today's marketplace than the well-oiled front office PR machine."

Brand Threat: Customers Talking Back

It’s obvious through McDonald’s corporate announcement that big marketing is turning to new media channels as print and web collateral, solely based on one-way branding, is not going to meet the new brand threat.

The universal message with its catchy ads, glitzy events and the "build it and they will come" attitude towards marketing is being turned away from.

The exact threat? The proliferation of RSS and related site syndication technologies have all rapidly given a voice to people who previously had no way of expressing their opinions. The Internet is no longer a closed-medium where knowledge does not affect or crossover into the offline, "real" world. Today’s viral marketing campaign can often alter opinions, change views, and sometimes lead to unforeseen consequences (the effect of the movie Super Size Me on McDonald’s being one of them). Combine these newfound customer interactive feedback mechanisms with an almost total lack of online censorship, and the general openness inherent in the Internet allows individuals and small groups the ability to take advantage of technology to reach, interact and amass with audiences in ways that no other media outlet has ever previously allowed.

But what exactly is it about a blog, you might be asking yourself that makes it so entirely different from the personal and corporate websites we all built extensively before the downturn in the economy back in 2001? Answer: blogs and RSS feeds are threats to brands. Because of their instantaneous and global publishing capabilities, blogs and RSS feeds (effectively customer brand touch points) can quickly catch brand managers and their strategies entirely off guard (making their current often static online website collateral seem non-responsive and old in comparison to the new global conversations now starting to take place). No worries. The next step is simply integrating blogs within websites. But, point is, on those blogs are conversations that need managing. By whom? PR. Why? Because disruptive messages that campaigns like Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 send out to audiences threaten brands (be it McDonalds or the Republican Party). But don’t think for a second that the “old” but effective approach to online marketing (sending out branded emails and canvassing highly-branded web sites with mind share banner ads) will work to effectively handle the new brand threat of blogging and talkback interactivity. Massive mindshare capture campaigns, while effective elsewhere, won’t help facilitate the conversation that corporate brands need to develop for themselves in the blogosphere. The previous approach, which ushered in the premise of our entire new online economy, was progressive and new at the time, but is seen as too "one-way" (and non-conversational) in the blogosphere. Monolithic marketing, atleast online, looks broken.

Blogger Brand Cocktail Party

“Brand Journalism” has been developed by a Fortune 100 company to meet the new brand threat. Even Seth Godin, the marketing guru behind several new economy books about e-marketing, praised McDonald’s for realizing that monolithic marketing is broken. But Godin pointed out though that the marketer doesn't get to run the conversation that Light is inviting. As Godin said, “It's not really ‘Brand Journalism’ that's happening, you see, it's ‘Brand Cocktail Party!’ You get to set the table and invite the first batch of guests, but after that the conversation is going to happen with or without you.”