An introductory guide to PR blogging

Posted Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 10:47pm in Blogging, Business, PR General  | 

A little outdated but still relevant. Thanks to CIPR president, Tony Bradley for quotes and uber Irish PR blogger, Piaras Kelly also for quotes and a little proof reading. Feel free to criticise, scrutinise or chastise.

A weblog, or blog as one is more commonly known, is a relatively new online communication channel that is impacting the public relations profession throughout the world. What was once used as an online diary for technology enthusiasts is now rapidly becoming a major communication tool for small and large corporations.

In its lowest descriptive form, a blog is a frequently updated website with a series of posts written by a blogger (blog author). These posts are published on a blog in reverse-chronological order where the most recent post will be at the top of the page. People visiting a blog can interact with the blogger by adding a comment, an idea or disagreement to any post the blogger has made.

Blogs are relatively easy to set-up and maintain and there is a number of free blog platform providers available on the Internet. The ease of starting a blog and the high amount of blog providers available have resulted in a sudden surge over the last couple of years.

What makes a blog a strong communication tool and what some PR practitioners would call ‘threatening’ is their ability to link to other blogs to form a vast network of conversations. Bloggers frequently link to one another in their posts, and if news is of relevancy, you can guarantee it will spread like wildfire from blogger to blogger, country to country.

This is worrying to some PR practitioners and main-stream-media as there is no control over the message or the delivery. Instead bloggers can work together to form micro news sources distributing to one another and cutting out the message gatekeepers. This is called citizen media or participatory journalism.

Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) president and partner of North East PR consultancy Bradley O’Mahoney Public Relations, Tony Bradley, says: “Blogs are a relatively new phenomenon and have successfully made the transition from ‘geek’ to actually being rather cool.

“I suspect that once the newness wears off they will become just another weapon in the professional communicator’s arsenal. But they are here to stay of that there is no doubt.”

He added: “Blogs are definitely another opportunity for PR practitioners to ensure a consistent message goes out across all distribution channels.”

Blogs run on a technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Don’t let this sound too hi tech as the use of RSS is really simple. RSS is a means of receiving the content from a number of blogs or websites straight to your desktop, as apposed to you trawling through hundreds of web pages to find out if a site has been updated or not.

Each blog has its own individual RSS feed that you can easily copy and paste into a RSS reader. RSS readers are available for free and can be downloaded from the Internet. Many of the major news sites including the BBC, Guardian, New York Times and Reuters all use RSS to distribute their news online.

So how do blogs affect the public relations profession? And why should PR professionals be educated on this growing medium? Consider the blog search engine Technorati (think of Google but for blogs). They are currently tracking over 20 million blogs world-wide and are reporting that one blog is created every second.

A majority of these will be started by individuals who use them as a means of self-expression, to talk about the latest blockbuster movie, how long it takes them to get to work, or to discuss niche topics like hand-gliding or uni-cycling.

But there are bloggers that want to talk about your clients or your clients’ products and services - many of them do so. This alone has thrown up many challenges for PR practitioners as they struggle to come to terms with this new medium.

One of the most famous cases of blogs having an impact on an organisation was on September 14, 2004 a blogger claimed he could unlock a bicycle lock made by lock manufacturer Kryptonite, using a ball point pen.

He recorded himself doing so with a video camera and posted the recording on a blog. Within hours it had spread across the blogosphere (the term given to describe the blog network) and within days it was covered in the New York Times and the Seattle Times, subsequently costing Kryptonite approximately £5.5m in replacements.

More recently, in June of last year, Jeff Jarvis, a media correspondent and Guardian columnist had purchased a faulty laptop from the online computer company Dell. After no satisfaction from Dell customer service, Jarvis began to blog about his experiences with the company in what he called the “Dell Hell Saga”.

His frequent Dell Hell posts were regularly commented on by other disgruntled Dell customers that led to a frenzied discussion across the blogosphere. Dell ignored Jarvis’s rants until online publications started asking questions to Dell’s PR department.

Three months later, Jarvis was finally refunded after a half-hearted statement from Dell about its products and how they will begin to monitor the blogosphere for customer feedback.

These issues could have been settled earlier if the PR teams at each company had engaged with the bloggers from the beginning. Identifying and dealing with the problem straight away could have ended in limited reputation damage. Both companies chose not to do so.

PR blogger, and practitioner at Drury Communications in Dublin, Piaras Kelly says: “In both cases the PR team should have identified both problems and responded faster. Their PR teams should obviously have been monitoring the Internet.

“There is no reason why PR practitioners should respond more readily to a complaint on traditional media than to a complaint online. In each instance, the complaint should be analysed to see if there is a potential issue.

“It is far easier and cheaper to monitor consumer feedback online; monitoring consumer tools like blogs is a much more efficient process for maintaining good relationships with an organisation’s publics.”

Although blogs can contribute to damaging a company’s reputation, they can also enhance one too. There are many companies who incorporate blogs as part of their communication strategy, including Microsoft, Google, Boeing and General Motors. Each has been viewed as successful moves.

Evangelists from the companies post information about new products, services or plans they are introducing and listen and engage in customer feedback on the corporate blogs. If you can imagine a world-wide focus-group then this is how feedback from a business blog can be thought of.

An example of the use of blogs as a feedback mechanism is when daily newspaper the Guardian recently went through a design revamp. The broadsheet size was changed to Berliner format, colour photographs were used instead of black and white, and the editors decided to drop the popular cartoon strip, Doonesbury.

Within days of dropping the cartoon it was reinstated after numerous complaints from customers on the Guardian blog – a blog set up to receive feedback while the newspaper was going through change.

“Blogs are an excellent way to create another channel to talk to a specific audience. They enhance the overall communications mix by adding a direct link to talk to customers”, says Kelly.

Although the blogosphere can be used to a company’s advantage it should be treated with care. Blogging etiquette is about communicating, engaging and listening. Bloggers will not put up with blatant gimmicks or spin. They ask for openness and transparency.

They want to be heard and they want to know that you are taking their opinions and discrepancies into consideration. If you are seen as trying to deceive or manipulate the conversation you will be shot down as quickly as you can say Internet. And remember, news travels fast in the blogosphere.

Blogging is said to be transforming how companies talk to their public, and some say could undermine methods of traditional public relations and journalism.

The use of blogs in journalism is worthy of an article itself but in October this year, Dr Jo Twist, a BBC reporter gave a presentation at the Lewis PR Blogging Seminar on how blogs are speeding up the delivery of news and why journalists are increasingly looking to blogs for original and offbeat stories, opinion and rumours.

As time goes on, consumers are becoming more tech savvy and many bloggers are beginning to incorporate audio and video into their blogs, providing visual and audio as well as print. Another sign that PR professionals should learn to adapt and embrace this new channel of communication in the ever advancing technology sector.

While some critics have proclaimed that blogs are the death of public relations, in reality they offer a new channel for organisations to develop relationships with their publics. PR practitioners face numerous challenges from blogs, but they also stand to benefit from it.

“Blogs will not replace PR because tools like blogs are simply a subset of PR. Public Relations can be defined as the management process of establishing, maintaining and enhancing relationships between an organisation and its key publics. Blogs cannot cater for all audiences because there are people who don’t use the Internet as others,” says Kelly.

Bradley added: “Although purist bloggers might claim that letting communications professionals get hold of blogs before they are posted is not in the slightly free-thinking nature of the beast, it’s a fact of life that many senior executives need to have their written output vetted by their PR advisor.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the profession missed a trick when the Internet was in its ascendancy and let the techies and designers take ownership of something which should have been partly ours.”

The Internet and new social media are bringing a new kind of PR - one that is providing new channels of communication but also throwing up new challenges for the profession. Perhaps the ones who can adjust to the changing climate are the ones that are willing to change.

As the well known blogger, Hugh Macleod once said, change is not death, fear of change is death.

Technorati tags:
blog, blogs, blogging, PR+blogs, PR+blogging, prblogger, PR, stephen+davies, piaras+kelly

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