Global PR Blog Week 1.0

The New PR - A Call to Action

The signs are here: Bill Gates pitches CEOs on bottom-up communication and empowerment, RSS, and "a thing called blogging," Business Week reports on the visible extinction of mass marketing, and the New York Times's editorialists tremble with anticipation at the thought that bloggers covering the Democratic Convention will "lace the proceedings with fresh insight and even some Menckenian impertinence." As the saying goes, we're living in interesting times.

The future - as always - seems bright. But we're not there yet.

There's a huge gap between the promises of tomorrow and the daily reality of Public Relations practice, and we can do something to fill this gap.

What do we need?

1. A reconsideration of the role played by PR professionals

The increased public pressure for transparency is met by the businesses' concern that, instead of building trust, this will expose organizations to further harsh scrutiny. But organizations will have to change in order to survive, and PR professionals can have a leading role in this process. Pitching blogs, monitoring micro media outlets, and offering RSS feeds are all fine endeavours (if done well) - but probably the most challenging task for PR pros will be to make the case for dialogic public relations and address the implications of such an approach in terms that will make sense for management. Employees' expectations for freedom of speech and opinion will grow, fuelled by the social and media habits of the internet generation, and by the constant pressure of having to deal with the daily conflict between online freedom (outside the workplace) and workplace restrictions. How to reconcile these expectations with the organizational culture and regulatory environment will be an important task for PR pros (for more about speech rights for corporate bloggers, see Jay Rosen: PR Needs to Stand for Real Transparency, Letter to Bill Gates, Soon to be a Weblogger).

2. A code of conduct for online communicators. Two starting points:

• The Arthur W. Page Society: Establishing Principles for Public Relations on the Internet
• Pete Snyder: Wanted: Standards for Viral Marketing

3. New tools

We need new ways of facilitating relationships (hint: see "relationship portals"), as well as tools for capturing, analyzing and understanding in real time the skyrocketing volume of conversation happening on the web. The use of RSS feeds and blog search engines is extremely useful, but we'll have to see if, and how, it will scale. Soon, notifications - as lists of headlines (or long pages of full text postings) - will be not enough; the next step is to have them analyzed in their context, grouped by various criteria, and represented in a compelling visual form.

4. New paradigms, players, and resources

With the rise of personal publishing, the whole process of public opinion formation is changing and we'll have to understand how various socio-technical shifts are factoring in.

We need to be willing to learn from other disciplines (Knowledge Management comes first in mind) and to start a dialogue with the academic world, that's a largely untapped resource of knowledge, expertise, and research skills and capabilities. There's a growing lack of communication between the academic and the professional world, and this is likely to affect both of them, and public relation as a field of knowledge. As the scholar publishing starts to change its business model under the influence of the open access movement, more and more academic articles will be available online, for free, if professionals will ask for them (notable, Reed Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of scientific and scholarly journals, including Public Relations Review, announced recently that allows authors to offer open access to their article, if they are posted on personal or institutional websites).

But that's not enough; we have to encourage the academic community to open itself and join the conversation. 15,000 new weblogs are created everyday, but we still have to found an American public relations professor who's blogging.

Also, we need to find a solution that will allow PR students and practitioners to learn about the changing landscape of the PR practice in real time - as changes are happening. The internet is still presented in PR textbooks as a "new technology" that offers "interesting opportunities". We past that point a long time ago, and we need internet-based learning materials and methods to capture the freshest knowledge in the field.

So, here's the challenge:

Let's create a community that will make all - or most - of these things happened.

The Global PR Blog Week has already coalesced a group a bloggers, most of them PR professionals and academics. We can expand this community, and start working at The New PR:

• We can continue to build on the resource created by this event.
• We can start to draft a code of conduct for online communicators.
• We can help PR and communication professors to start blogging, by offering them help and advice.
• We can start asking authors to make their articles available for the larger community of PR practitioners.
• We can start writing a collaborative, online PR textbook that it will be available online for free.

And that's just the beginning.

This is what I'd like to do - how about you?

Author: Constantin Basturea | Jul 16, 04 | Permalink | 3 comments
Category: @ Constantin Basturea | Topic 5 State of PR Profession

 

 

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