Re-thinking PR
Each new technology re-shapes our world. The great historian Braudel said that France was created by the railroad, as was the USA. Telephones destroyed distance even more. Radio created the idea of the ‘audience at home’. TV created, or accelerated the creation, of mass markets – changing journalism, politics and marketing forever.
What will blogs do? We have some inclinations but I think it is still far too early to tell with any real clarity and certainty. But we do know that the world of PR will be turned upside down over the next few years as we re-invent ourselves in response to this awe-inspiring new phenomenon.
In the past year or two, blogging has already achieved a remarkable prominence. Everyday, a google alert brings me articles about blogging in the mainstream media. Many of these are still introductory and almost apologetic. Some are attacks on blogging by ‘concerned’ journalists. Concerned mostly about the sheer numbers of blogs and the millions of unedited posts that appear on them each day.
This flow of information and opinion is unprecedented in human history. The potential for misinformation is disturbing for some people (especially politicians, corporations and others in the public spotlight) but the liberating effects are far more significant.
For a long time, our democratic societies have been constrained by the fact that we have relatively few media outlets and that very few people ever have any opportunity to participate in the debates that go on in those media forums.
Public Relations, as we understand it today, has grown up in this environment – it is largely a by-product of it - and is literally a mirror image of the mainstream media problem; which we might call the ‘restricted access’ problem.
We largely practice PR with the purpose of helping our clients get through those restrictions (with reputations unscathed), and to derive maximum impact from promoting their messages to the mainstream media’s ‘captured’ audiences (leveraging off the media’s authority to secure invaluable third-party endorsement).
Many of us in PR have grown tired of this insiders game and blogging will help us, and our clients wean, ourselves off this incestuous dependence on the mainstream media.
Blogging is different from other mediums because it collapses the distinction between producer and consumer. Bloggers and blog readers are essentially the same people. Instead of largely passive audiences, complex webs of online communities and conversations are being created.
Intervening, and influencing, these communities and conversations, will require different skills, techniques, protocols and strategies. Up until now, ‘feedback’ has been the poor cousin of PR, which has been mostly concerned with the disciplined download of cleverly-crafted, and tightly-controlled, messages.
Bloggers love the new medium for all the reasons that make it a scary prospect for traditional PR and old-style journalists. Blogging emphasises ‘authentic voice’ and genuine interaction – it can be fast, rough and unpredictable, a bit like the real world as it is lived by real people. This is very different to what currently passes for communication in the worlds of business and politics.
The ease, power and popularity of blogging is already challenging the media’s centrality, and consequently its importance. Even in these early days, we are seeing a growth in direct communication with stakeholders by organisations and the use of blogs to raise the level of media accountability to unprecedented levels.
The decline in the media’s centrality and authority is a double-edged sword for PR practitioners. It gives us the capacity to go around the narrow media gateway and develop richer more robust relationships with our stakeholders.
The decline in the media’s centrality also means that PR will become less synonymous with media relations. PR has too often meant getting stuff in the newspapers (and on Radio and TV), often to supplement and enhance advertising.
For instance, many people are getting more of their information filtered through blogs. This means that they read the blogger’s take on the article before they click-through to the article. Our messages now have to ‘get through’ the journalist and then through the bloggers who link to it.
Blogging also provides complex instantaneous feedback networks of extraordinary power. PR practitioners will have to be plugged into these networks and be able to participate in them on terms set by bloggers. Not easy, given that most of us tend towards the ‘control-freak’ end of the spectrum.
Word-of-mouth has always been the best marketing tool, by a long way. Viral marketing, in recent years, has built on word-of-mouth. But blogging takes it into a whole new dimension.
Recently, before I bought an iPod, I found myself not only asking my next door neighbour about his experience with the product, I also checked around the blogosphere to check the reality was living up to the hype. I’ll be doing this with a lot of purchases in the future, I think.
But how do we – as PR practitioners - influence bloggers? The answer I think will be as old as PR itself. It’s about relationships, stupid. Our clients will have to build reputations for honesty and openness and show a willingness to mix it in the marketplace of ideas on a far more equal footing than ever before.
That could really put PR at the heart of the organisation, as an essential part of what every organisation does. Now that is exciting.
Author: Trevor Cook | Jul 12, 04 | Permalink
| 7 comments
Category: @ Trevor Cook | Topic 1 PR and Participatory Journalism
I totally agree with Trevor's take on how PR will fit into the blogosphere. Now, more than ever, PR people will have to dispense with 'corporate speak' and 'messages.' We must learn to communicate openly, with reality, and build solid relationships with customers and media people.
Back in 1999 Cluetrain spoke of how the Internet is making connected market places where people are beginning to talk to each other.
Word of mouse is faster and more powerful than word of mouth. And it reaches more people.
Yes, it can lead to rumour mongering and inaccuracies. So as PR people, we'd better be on our toes and equipped to handle it.
One recent example is a company planning to go public in the near future. They are currently building a website. It has lots of data lauding the validity of their service.
But if you tap into blogs and news groups on the subject of spam, there is a deluge of bitter ranting about them.
Their PR department did not even know this existed, let alone what to do about it.
The public are no longer sitting on the couch just being the effect of your communication - they are talking back.
So transparency, truth, a willingness to communicate openly and build relationships (the very basics of good PR) are going to be vital in this new fast paced technology.
Posted by: Sally Falkow at July 12, 2004 10:45 AM
I think you're right Sally its going to be about going back to the basics of PR of being people who facilitate open, honest and meaningful communications in our societies rather than too much careful spinning.
I also think we've ignored the feedback / conversation aspect of this for far too long.
Posted by: Trevor Cook at July 12, 2004 01:13 PM
Trevor, I'm not sure I would put that much weight on blogging now or in the future. It's a tool -- a communications tool. Blogging will develop in its own way and in its own time. I'm not sure it will be any more transparent than the media are now because as you have said yourself, control is THE issue for corporations and corporate communicators.
Some parts of society will become more transparent, but many will not.
Blogs have a flaw that cannot be remedied easily. There are too many of them, and they are noise rather than information in too many cases. There are fewer traditional media for a reason -- people don't want to look in numerous places for news. They don't want to avail themselves of unrestricted access. They're too busy.
This is a fundamental issue that blogs will need to address soon enough.
Posted by: Jim Horton at July 12, 2004 02:20 PM
Jim,
I agree with you that blogs are simply a communications tool, and I believe that they will likely be supplanted in the buzz in the future, as websites were in the past. That being said, however, I think they are symptomatic of a truly fundamental change in the practice of communications, which is a change in the underlying assumption of control to one of conversation.
When anyone can easily publish an opinion, and group together with like-minded people to create some action over the course of minutes and days, the assumption that organizations can control this ("damage control") is faulty. I've said a lot about this topic in the past and others are here, so I won't blather on.
The noise level is an issue that needs to be dealt with. In fact, I think this will require a mix of technology and human training in learning how to filter all the noise.
Posted by: Elizabeth Albrycht at July 12, 2004 02:43 PM
Yep, it's about the relationship AND it's about who you know and who knows you. I manage a simple list of sites that use CSS for positioning. When I re-did the design and manually checked every link, I found a few hundred that were no more and most were blogs.
There are countless blogs out there. Admit it -- few would blog if there was an audience of one. We all want an audience otherwise why do it? Yes, we love sharing our thoughts, questions, and opinions; but what good is it if we feel like we're talking to a wall?
The key thing is to know what you want to do with your blog. It can be as simple as using it as a tool to update your Web site more regularly than you would if you had no blog tool. But then, is it defined as a content management system rather than a blog?
My mind is going in all sorts of directions as I have rewritten this a few times. In a nutshell, there are a darn lot of blogs out there and we only have so much time to read and exchange information.
Posted by: Meryl K. Evans at July 12, 2004 06:41 PM
I think there are a couple of answers to the 'too many blogs' problem. 1) Who cares? Better to have too many outlets and have to find the ones you like than to have a choice between just a few outlets, in Australia some cities have just one daily newspaper owned by Murdoch, one national newspaper owned by murdoch and the world's only left wing financial newspaper. I love the idea of limitless choice 2) News feeds help us scan a lot of blogs and sites and save a lot of time and let us focus more easily on what we want, as do Google news feeds etc With new tools like the Findory Blogory and Kinja emerging I think this will get easier and more user friendly all the time 3) We can use other bloggers as our assistant filters and web navigators, this is a point Rebecca Blood made a few years ago and I think as you get involved in blogging it gets easier to do this in fact it just sort of happens naturally after awhile. A new tool on Bloglines the clipblog makes it really easy to use other bloggers as navigators.
Posted by: Trevor Cook at July 12, 2004 06:52 PM
Trevor,
An ongoing challenge with blogs will be that just about anyone with Internet access will eventually have their own blog and/or web site. In fact, we're heading towards the day where everyone will have their own IP address, which will follow us everywhere and identify us no matter what end-user device we may be using. It's clear as technology is enabling access anywhere that posting a blog may soon not even require a keyboard. it's not farfetched that we may soon be able to dial our own personal gateways and simply speak our latest blog, or post a blog to another's thread.
Blogging seems to parallel the metrics, or lack thereof, for Internet advertising. The fact that the media has frequently been writing about blogs is one point. But what impact, if any, will the proliferation of blogs really have on moving the needle? Will there develop an elite group of influential bloggers that exert national & global influence? Will we have the blog haves and blog have nots?
The absolute reality of anyone, anywhere, having a blog seems daunting to most in the PR profession (especially those involved with corporate reputation). And it seems many companies and PR agencies continue to focus on the influential blogs and bloggers as a mini "Consumer Reports", while at the same time keeping an eye out for negative blogging about their companies or clients.
Sure, it would be nice to have an extended army of PR professionals just to address blogs. But the reality, at least today, is to conduct outreach where and when feasible, or do triage when blogging turns ugly. Where all of this is heading is unclear. But what is clear is that the PR profession can not ignore the blog saga, and we all must carefully monitor how the story and technology unfolds.
Posted by: Rich Teplitsky at July 15, 2004 02:19 PM
- About
- The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.
- Links
- The New PR Wiki
- Recent Entries
- Looking forward to 2.0
- Site Statistics and Trends
- A participant’s final thoughts
- Traditional PR is dead - Long Live DIY PR
- Quiet is the new loud
- Recent Comments
- Rick Barry on A Very Brief Look at Blogging for the Uninitiated Executive
- George Mc Quade on The Battle Over PR
- Duncan Adams on Robert Scoble interviewed on Corporate Blogging
- Kevin O'Keefe on How to launch a corporate blog for a professional services organization
- William Luu on Site Statistics and Trends
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