Aug 20th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, PR, Style, Wal-Mart | No Comments
I’ve been working on a research paper dealing with the language and style of corporate blogs, specifically Life at Wal-Mart, for a few weeks now. My suspicion - that I think I can express with a good deal of certainty now - is that Life at Wal-Mart is a fake blog (or flog) in the sense that it would not be described as genuine by most people who know what a blog is.
How do I know?
Well, there are several indicators. In the 52 entries that I have analyzed there is not a single hyperlink, nor is there any instance where an external source (another blog, news website etc) is quoted.
Not once.
Of course it isn’t impossible for a blog to not link or quote, but it is a severe deviation from the norm. Another thing that struck me (and there are many more indicators that are listed in detail in the paper) is something mind-numbingly simply but quite salient:
Blogs contain the word blog. Life at Wal-Mart doesn’t.
Certainly newspaper editorials and scientific papers are bound to have a higher frequency of the terms editorial and paper than other types of texts, but the number of blogs without the word blog in them beats the statistical significance of that by a huge leap. It’s rather impossible, it seems, to blog without talking about it and when people talk about it they have no choice but to use that term, because it’s the only one we currently have. The New York Times is unlikely to be full of references to the Washington Post for obvious reason, but in blogs mentioning other sources, quoting and linking them is the standard practice. And even if you don’t do it, any sort of reflection on what you’re doing will practically force you to use the word. Blogs that don’t either A) link to or quote other blogs or B) contain some kind of meta-language can be described as virtually impossible and my corpus data reflects that.
So, what does that mean? Well, obviously a blog can be fake and still use the term blog in every single post. But if ad copy, testimonials or other textual building blocks from commercial genres are simply stuffed into Wordpress and the result is called a blog, this method should pick it up.
Jul 2nd, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Johnson & Johnson, PR | 1 Comment
While it’s been on the Web for a month now, here’s the belated notice: pharma giant Johnson & Johnson has launched a blog (found via BBW). From the opening post:
Everyone else is talking about our company, so why can’t we? There are more than 120,000 people who work for Johnson & Johnson and its operating companies. I’m one of them, and through JNJ BTW, I will try to find a voice that often gets lost in formal communications.
The “go where the conversation is”-argument is a powerful one, especially in an industry that has its share of image problems (though Sicko is about another branch of the healthcare industry, insurance). From what I can tell, big pharma has not been very open to blogging up to this point and there is clearly a degree of uncertainty about how to use the new platform:
I’ve been reading blogs for only a few months now, but already it’s clear to me how important it is not just to watch, but to join in productively. Doing that will take some unlearning of old habits and traditional approaches to communicating — and I will have to find my own voice
The similarities with other “first posts” are quite interesting. Hmm, I think I’m going to do a brief analysis of these opening entries some time.
Apr 18th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, PR, Social Web | 2 Comments
As I already noted in the last post, it seems that I missed a whole lot of interesting things in March. Since I enjoy the luxury of not having to breathlessly post about the newest fad six times per day, I can occasionally link to “old news” and pretend it’s hot stuff - especially since you may well have missed this one before.
Last month Philippe Borremans reported on the EuroBlog 2007 and about a survey that the organizers Philip Young, Swaran Sandhu and Ansgar Zerfass conducted among PR professionals (full report as PDF available here). A few important points noted by Philippe:
The 3 biggest challenges for PR Professionals to use blogs in their organisation are:
* having time to blog regularly (83%)
* reacting to comments/feedback from the audience (83%)
* creating content and ideas for posts (80% !)
The 3 biggest opportunities for PR Professionals are:
* environmental scanning, keeping a finger on the pulse (81%)
* fast reaction time to issues (74%)
* opportunity for authentic (!), personal communications (77%)
Two thoughts immediately popped into my head when looking at these points, especially the challenges. I’ll start with the less significant one.
PR professionals are generally experienced writers who can whip up a press release on the fly and know how to write informatively and economically. They are familiar with conventions and rules for the “right” way of writing and they know how to deliver a precisely tailored message in a predetermined format.
But that’s not what blogging is.
Now, before you’re worried that I’ll give you a tiring lecture on what (business) blogging is - I won’t do that because there is no one single answer (but have a look here if you’re curious). You can interpret blogging to be anything that’s published via Wordpress or on Blogger regardless of how it’s written or by whom, or you can associate a certain way of writing, comments, etc with blogging, regardless of the technology used to publish something. It comes as no surprise that the technology is usually the heavier indicator: if it’s on LiveJournal you’re more likely to call it a blog than if I spray paint it on a wall, irrespective of the words that I use.
But even if we accept that there are many different ways of writing a blog, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a typical way of blogging. And because the style and tone of that approach have evolved outside of PR and have not yet solidified into a fixed form, PR people have trouble adjusting to such a game, where the rules are suddenly different (or, even worse, where you make up your own rules). Publishing is not communicating. Text design changes drastically when you understand blogs as conversations (and yes, I know that metaphor has been used a thousand times) because the social component of an exchange is strongly emphasized in conversation, while it is usually de-emphasized in publishing.
Another issue relates to the origins of social media. The term social media implies a new or somehow special kind of media, but that is actually misleading, because it tempts us to see the whole thing in the familiar old media frame - new technologies, different and perhaps more contributors, but basically the same process. But it really isn’t, when you think about it. Social media at its core is an egoistic communicative behavior, in the sense that individuals do it (a) for themselves (b). It’s a combination of personal expression and social grooming and without the interpersonal dimension it is stone dead. The trouble is that the P in PR stands for PUBLIC, not for PERSONAL RELATIONS, and consequently the mode of expression that this industry has perfected has always been geared towards the mass, not towards the individual.
That can of worms is big enough, but let me finally get to the much simpler issue, one that relates to who is making social media.
What do people have who check for new messages in their countless groups on Facebook several times a day? Who redesign their MySpace profile every week? Upload hundreds of clips to YouTube and let us know that they are looking out of the window right now on Twitter?
Time. Lots of it.
And that is the main difference between college students and professionals in most industries - especially those with an 80-hour workweek. My personal impression is that having to learn how these things work is not nearly as effective as learning them naturally because you have the time to experiment with them. It’s not a question of age - at least I don’t think so. It’s a question of having the right amount of leisure time to adjust, adapt and come up with something original (when we’re talking about blogging, at least) and that is something you need more than five minutes for. It’s also not a question of “not getting it”, or of companies being generally incapable of integrating the social media into their communicative behavior. It’s about learning to socialize in public. And that is something you’re likely to have trouble with if you’re used to socializing privately in the little free time you have.
Now, I know that I’ve been equating business blogging with the much larger category of “the social media”, but even assuming that the goals in that area are more clearly defined, the problem remains the same. You don’t learn to waltz by downloading a ring tone. And you don’t learn to communicate effectively through a blog unless you spend a lot of time reading blogs and blogging.
Perhaps there should be blog-writing courses in subjects like MassComm and Economics to better prepare students for their future careers. Academics can be expected (hopefully!) to know a thing or two about blogging, at least if they’re in the Humanities.
After all, we get to lean back and think idle thoughts during our work hours a lot more than those PR people do…
Apr 10th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, Fake Blogs, Gourmet Station, PR, ROI of Blogging, Robert Scoble | 1 Comment
That’s the title of a great 1997 album by Blonde Redhead and as it happens, it is also today’s topic - just in a way not related to alternative rock, but to (corporate) blogging.
Here’s the thing: it never ceases to intrigue me how often I come across blogging-related advice. There’s no shortage of suggestions, guidelines and even rules out there - rules that are often considered absolute and inviolable by those who postulate them. Often suggestions from perceived authorities such as Robert Scoble and Debbie Weil on how to blog are interpreted as dogma; for example, the maxims that blogs are personal, that you must be transparent and so forth have all become pervasive*. How often have you read that a blog is a conversation, or that misleading readers about the identity or motives of the blogger is immoral?
I don’t want to challenge any of these ideas, but I do want to make a distinction between the different shades of meaning of the words blog, blogging and blogger, because it is hard to talk about something when you lack a consistent definition. I also want to question the validity of the judgment that certain blogs are “fake”, or at least ask whether that’s really a bad thing.
Blogging is understood alternately understood as
a) the use of a publishing technology
b) the style in which blogs are often written
c) the type of social interaction between the blogger and his readers
and often - but not always - it is the combination of all three of these things. Note that they build upon each other: a bloggy style makes limited sense when you’re writing a letter (using another publishing technology), because even though the two types of text share several common traits they also differ significantly in other regards.
Say you’re a Java developer who likes to write about coding, snowboarding in the Rockies and Frank Miller comic books. You’ve set up an installation of Wordpress on your own webserver and publish your first entry. It could start like this:
Hey everyone! So, guess what, I’ve decided to start a blog too. I’ll post here from time to time to talk about whatever catches my interest […]
Even with just a handful of words, it can be clearly established that this kind of writing appeared in a blog and not, say, a newspaper, a personal diary, or a speech, even though it contains elements that are also common in these genres (of course it has the word “blog” in it, but even without that keyword I think a classification is possible). Now imagine that you’re a loyal reader of this blog and one day you find out that your snowboarding hacker friend is actually an invention - a fictional character developed by the department of systematic deception (DoSD) of a global PR firm (let’s call it Noble PR).
How would you react to this piece of information?
I think one gets a good idea of how people feel about these things when looking at blogs like this one and reactions such as these (read the first few comments). Blogs like Gourmet Station’s have been widely criticized for “violating the rules” and “being fake”. Where do these sentiments come from? They are the result of a holistic interpretation of blogs as a specific combination of a publishing technology, a style of writing and a kind of social interaction (a + b + c; see above). In other words: if you run a blogging software, write from a first-person viewpoint and directly address your readers, it is assumed that you are a real person, because only real human beings can engage in such an interaction (meaning a + b implicates c).
There are good reasons why you might want to use a blog as a publishing tool without writing in a bloggy style or allowing comments from your readers. Tools such as Wordpress and Movable Type are used for everything from publishing poetry to managing entire websites and their versatility makes “non-traditional” usages plausible. But the Catch 22 appears to be style: if a writer makes frequent use of the first-person pronoun, vocatives, interjections and other stylistic elements that are traditionally frequent in spoken language in what looks like a blog in terms of presentation, it must be assumed that he is communicating with me, because that is how a typical blog works.
Social interactions of even the simplest type represent an investment for the participants. I react to you in a certain way because I have assumptions both about you and about your assumptions about me. If my assumptions turn out to be unfounded, the result is a loss of face. Nobody wants to deal with someone who isn’t honest about their identity.
The special thing about blogs is that the technological frame they live in makes it especially plausible to assume these things. Nobody finds the conversational style described above terribly confusing or irritating in a novel, despite the fact that we usually know the difference between the voice of the author and the voice of his fictional characters**. But the difference is that I can’t interact with the author when reading a novel and thus there is very little likelihood that I’ll mistake what is going on for a real instance of communication that somehow involves me.
So where does that leave us? And why is the title of this post “fake can be just as good”?
Despite the outrage two years ago, the fictional T. Alexander still blogs for Gourmet Station and the blog has a PageRank of 5 out of 10 (this site has a mere 3). It shows up in fourth place if you google for “gourmet blog” and, according to Technorati, almost 400 links poin there. Finally the Northeastern University/Backbone Media Study lists it as an example for successful corporate blogging.
Here’s a (rather long) excerpt that provides an excellent picture of Gourmet Station’s approach to the blog (taken from the study):
Donna described how everything on the blog has to be consistent with the brand. She moderates the comments and makes sure those comments are consistent with the brand. No profanity or unrelated comments are allowed on the blog. Donna explained that “everything has got to be very buttoned up, we have a very buttoned up brand, and we have a very upscale brand, very upscale, well educated customers. So anything that goes out there has to be consistent with that.” The blog also allows the company to discuss their content in a laid back tone. That content has produced higher rankings on search engines and helped to increase traffic to the blog by 10%.
Donna believes it to be important that the people who write on the blog are knowledgeable about food and wine. The blog’s readers are looking for ideas around food, drink, and entertainment.
The blog has helped Donna’s company add content to their website on the topics and products the company is focused on providing. Also, the blog has given Donna the ability to place content that they otherwise would not have been able to put on their website. Donna said it was important that a company covers all of the topics they wish to cover in their blog posts, and to categorize those topics by keyword.
The Gourmet Station blog has achieved a number two ranking on the keyword “gourmet dinners” in Yahoo! The blog has played a big part in helping the company to achieve that ranking. According to Donna, the blog has also helped establish the company’s brand and provide more sales conversions by making a “passionate connection” with readers.
The topic that generates the most conversation and interaction from readers on the blog is romance. Donna said that made sense, as the search volumes for romance and dinner have a great connection.
Donna selects the content of the posts by season. Donna said the blog has 14 categories, and the company always has a recent post in each of the categories.
Donna recommends a company have a strategy before starting to blogging. Her company has two strategies: to fill their categories with content and to increase they’re (sic) ranking on search engines.
The bottom line appears to be: Gourmet Station designed a blog to increase search engine visibility and to publish material that did not fit into the context of a traditional corporate site. Perhaps they felt that this material was too context-dependent (recipes for seasonal gourmet foods, etc), or that a less formal style of writing was needed, but only in a certain limited area and not for the entire site. Whatever their motivation - there is hardly a rational reason to argue against their success. Whether “fake” or “real” (note the quotes), it appears that different strategies can realize different goals for different people.
I’m pretty sure that examples such as the Gourmet Station blog will remain marginal, though. It’s not really because of the outrage “fake” company blogs generate (is there such a thing as bad PR?), but because it seems somewhat contrived and unnecessary to come up with a fictional character to write your blog when you might just as well have a real person do it. It’s not too hard to stick with The Message even when you’re blogging under your own name - numerous product blogs out there prove that. How you measure success is an entirely other question. In that context, note Gourmet Station’s specific goals of increasing visibility and publishing “unconventional” content.
So there it is. You can blog, or you can publish via a blog. Or you can do the latter and hope that people will believe it’s really the former. Not much shame in that, I think.
* The single most important document in this context is probably Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto, which has seems to have influenced most subsequently formulated blogging guidelines.
** Of course this is systematically exploited in literature, for example in epistolary novels. Playing with the status of a piece of writing as ambiguously real or fictional was also a hallmark of Postmodernism.
(Edit) Here are a few more interesting links I initially forgot to include: one, two, three.
Mar 18th, 2007 | Blogging Legal Issues, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, IBM, Jonathan Schwartz, PR | 2 Comments
That’s essentially the brave question that Phil Hall asks over at Strumpette (found via Blog Campaigning) in a very interesting post. He summarizes his own attitude as follows.
I would like to make a statement that many PR people will view as apostasy: I think corporate blogs are, on the whole, a waste of time.
Well, he isn’t the first to make such an outrageous claim, though it could be that he’s the first person in PR. He continues by arguing that even those company blogs that perpetrate it aren’t really written for consumers but target the media crowd.
People like me are looking for quality goods at reasonable prices. Reading the blog posting of some CEO ruminating on this-and-that is of no value to folks like me.
[Just a quick stylistic observation: it’s genuinely cute (and clever) to start a sentence with the phrase people like me and then end the next one with folks like me if you’re the former president of Open City Communications, a New York PR agency, and former editor of PR News. I imagine that PR executives with book deals are not entirely en par with the majority of people shopping at Wal-Mart in terms of income. But perhaps that’s just my dirty mind. It doesn’t hurt his argument either - I just assume that somewhere in PR school you learn that it’s always better to phrase personal opinions in the “folks-like-me-plural”.]
Hall then raises several familiar points: consumers don’t care about company blogs, blogging is risky because of litigation, a comment-enabled blog gives trolls and haters a platform, etc. He closes asking for examples of interesting corporate blogs.
But beyond those examples – sorry, but I am not aware of corporate blogs being used as anything more than a poorly-disguised sales vehicle. If you know of some genuinely clever examples of the format, please share them here – I would love to learn about them and have a reason to change my negative opinion.
I think there are quite a few counter-examples, though his criticism that many company blogs are boring and manipulative is certainly legitimate. My impression is that many smart implementations of blogging exist to improve company-internal communication. I’ve commented on the MSDN and Oracle blog hubs before - they represent knowledge management resources which enable tech experts to exchange ideas and improve products. I’m pretty sure Joe User doesn’t care about ASP.NET errors, but to people writing code for a living it’s clearly a relevant issue. Internal blogs have become a fixture in the tech sector and it seems they have potential in other areas as well. For a rare and valuable piece of empirical research on internal corporate blogging at IBM see Kolari et al (thanks to Pranam for pointing me to it).
Let’s look at other applications of corporate blogging as well. Apart from marketing there’s PR, customer relations management, recruiting, communication, lobbying and strategy blogging, plus countless hybrids. All of these functions target different groups of people (look here for a -certainly incomplete- list and more thoughts on the issue). Thus it is quite possible, nay, likely that Joe Consumer is not the target audience for XYZ Corp’s CEO blog. The target audience are partners, investors, competitors and of course journalists, who can be counted on to follow such a blog quite closely.
In that context it is interesting that Hall brings up the SEC.
And what about the investment community? Yeah, can you imagine the SEC giving the thumbs up for publicly-traded companies using blogs to communicate with investors?
Yes, I can. While no decision has been made yet (to my knowledge), I think Cox’s comment serves as an indicator that blogs may soon be used for exactly that purpose.
With such an audience, the idea that posts are edited and reviewed carefully before publication is perfectly plausible - and then again, why not? The idea that blogs must be unedited and highly personal confuses the historical origin of blogs as web-based diaries with their status today. In other words: you can use blogs purely as a means of publishing content on-line, or you can adopt a “bloggy” style of writing. There are no rules when it comes to how you write - you can rehash ad copy or explain your corporate strategy, write about annoying business trips or how to make cranberry walnut bread. All that is corporate blogging and all of it, presumably, somehow serves a purpose for the companies that sponsor it.
So corporate blogs can potentially serve a number of purposes, many of which are outside the scope of marketing or PR. Huge global players such as IBM need sophisticated tools to communicate and coordinate their efforts internally - most people will agree that email is no longer the appropriate tool for that. Beyond internal communication corporate blogs are relevant where they address specific people with some kind of stake in the company’s actions: disgruntled consumers, activists, potential employees, competitors, shareholders, journalists, bloggers. The only thing that won’t work is starting a blog about toilet paper because that’s what you happen to sell. If you can’t make it relevant to anyone, don’t start a corporate blog. The chic of blogging alone won’t do.
But in the end this is less about how companies (or institutions in general) can use blogging as an effective tool and more about how employee blogging will change companies in the long run. Corporate hierarchies partly exist to manage the flow of information inside an organization. Executives are supposed to know and understand internal processes and manage them effectively. But once everyone in an organization is more or less connected with everyone else the overall need for a strict hierarchy is at least somewhat diminished.
Now, I’m no utopian suggesting that organizations will somehow be crowd-governed in the future, but it seems plausible to assume that the monopoly of a few (management, PR, communications dept) to exclusively represent a company to “the outside world” and to control the flow of information internally is fading. Of course nobody is going to care about anything you have to say just because they buy your products. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people listening quite closely - for other reasons. My impression is that “the long tail of corporate blogging” - i.e. employee blogging - will matter more than glitzy PR texts or marketing copy in the long run. I believe this because our conception of public vs. personal communication is in the process of changing radically and in that light it seems illogical to assume that institutions will somehow be spared from the effects.
Perhaps the whole question of who drives the changes vs. who is driven by them follows the inverted logic of the classic Slashdot meme: in Soviet Russia, corporate blog writes you.
Feb 21st, 2007 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, PR | No Comments
Just finished this piece by Shel Israel on the significance of personal involvement in business blogging. As he puts it:
[…] by adding some personal information, it helps me as one of those customers, prospects, co-workers, etc. see a real human inside that labyrinth of organization where you work. […] I may want to know enough of your personal life to understand that you are a human. […] As we wrote in naked Conversations, “We live in an age when most people don’t trust large organizations.” But blogging lets us break down the large organizations into real human units of energy and it makes a great deal of difference in how the overall company is perceived.
I’ve been beating the same drum with the things I’ve posted about trust and the individual in conjunction with blogging. Blogging is in many ways symptomatic for a general trend towards individualization, a trend that acknowledges the social component of any kind of human interaction. In that vein the Edelman Trust Barometer released last month found that the trend to rely more readily on peers than on corporate or political leaders continues. “Someone like me” is the person we place the most trust in - a view that makes perfect sense when you think about how leaders in large organizations usually communicate. The distance between them and us makes us assume that they don’t know anything about us and that they have a hidden agenda when talking to us.
Here’s an interesting observation David Brain of Edelman made in an interview with the FT (see here and here):
This year “a person like me” is the most trusted source of information across the EU, North America and Latin America. In the the US trust levels are at 51 per cent and in the UK, Germany and France they average 45 per cent. We believe that the web and the rise of social networks has been a big driver of this. It has had a democratising effect if you like in that the “answers” can now be found to many questions from sources other than the old institutions. I think we are seeing an erosion of deference in all fields.
I’m sure you’ve read more than enough about Web 2.0 with all of its associated hype (I know I have), but even if Brain is quick to draw a connection between trust in peers and the social web the overall trend cannot be overlooked. As technology allows us to connect with virtually everyone we know virtually all the time, and in addition to that to connect to others with whom we share interests, beliefs and passions, we are increasingly fed up with the inflexible, rigid structure of a traditional organization. And we’re especially weary of those at the top of the pyramid because we question the power they posses because they are up there. In our new, “me-centric” organization - the social network - everything else is aligned around us, while a traditional organization ultimately revolves around itself.
One problem is clearly the perceived distance between those in power and us and it is likely the prime reason there are blogging CEOs (if too few). But I wonder if the role of leadership in general is not about to change significantly. Quote Richard Edelman:
The era of the rock star CEO is over - now it is about quiet competence and strong leadership with employees, customers and investors.
I guess that would make Steve Jobs the last of his kind…
Feb 3rd, 2007 | Blogosphere, Corporate Blogging, PR | No Comments
One thing that never fails to astonish me is how the blogosphere can make the most casual comments turn viral in a completely unpredictable way. When I was deleting spam comments earlier today, I noticed incoming links from Adriana Lukas and Kristine Lowe. Of course it’s always flattering to be quoted, but I think beyond that it perfectly demonstrates the potential of blogs when a comment you’ve left three months ago in someone else’s blog suddenly shows up in a new context. The comment that Adriana and Kristine quoted relates to the Edelman flog incident. I found it hard to grasp at the time that Edelman apparently needed to exert some form of control over the sponsored bloggers and that this control was assumed to be worth the risk of having them exposed as fakes. Or, to be more precise: the impact of them saying something negative about Wal-Mart was deemed greater than the impact of a possible exposure.
As we found out later, this was a pretty major miscalculation.
In that vein exactly, Adriana concisely notes in a recent entry:
On the internet you are not an institution. If you want to be and behave like one, you get isolated and bypassed. So a media/communications/PR strategy makes little sense. It’s back to communication between human beings, communities and sometimes mobs. The rules of social interactions apply - if people challenge you on something you have done or said and you don’t respond, expect a commensurate impact on your reputation or credibility. If people make fun of you or try to embarrass you, the choice is to remain silent in hope of appearing dignified or to shoot back, with indignation or with humour. It depends. Different responses will be appropriate at different times and different circumstances. That is why etiquette is so complicated. Media and communications strategies don’t even come close. The main difference is that you don’t need to be ‘trained’ for online communication, it’s the one that you already know. And whether you are good at it or not has nothing to do with communication skillz but with respect for others and some good manners.
Brochures, press releases, ads, etc are always produced by a number of stakeholders inside an institution, sometimes even with the additional support of others from the outside (think advertising campaigns). All these people collaborate to make a piece of communication perfect, i.e. to give it a form that will appeal to as many people as possible. In the process of vetting the communication, any recognizable connection between the individuals speaking and those who are being addressed is severed. The voice is that of the company and not that of any particular individual working for it. What I’m describing isn’t some evil scheme of corporate communications either - it was simply the most effective way to mediate between an institution and the anonymous public around it… in the pre-Internet age.
But since individuals now see eye to eye with institutions in terms of their power to communicate and publicize ideas, they increasingly demand that institutions act like human beings in a communication. The rules of social interactions apply, as Adriana keenly observes, and like the uncool kid on a playground a company may be teased, ridiculed and embarrassed by its peers. Now think about Adriana’s statements that a media/communications/PR strategy makes little sense and that media and communications strategies don’t even come close (to solving the problem) in such a situation. Apart from the fact that they’re devised for a different kind of communicative situation (one-way), what else is problematic with such strategies? Two things, in my opion. Firstly, strategies are planned. The troublesome part is that people know this and usually deduct that the goal of a strategy must be to deceive them (think about the Wal-Mart/Edelman issue). After all, I might come up with a strategy for a lecture, a job interview or a political speech, but if I developed a strategy before chatting with my friends what kind of person would that make me? Secondly, strategies are static in the sense that they make general, fixed assumptions about what works and what doesn’t and, more narrowly, about how to achieve a positive effect. But they are useless if you need to adapt to a new situation because they offer a single recipe for everything.
So what’s PR good for in world where fixed messages are passé? A lot, in my opinion, if you put the emphasis on relations and not on public. Because although I agree with Adriana that manners and respect for others are the foundation of communicative competence, I think there is such a thing as skill involved. It’s why some kids are more popular than others and why being a talented writer also makes you a more effective blogger. Helping institutional clients to learn interacting with individuals - provided they bring manners and respect to the table - is what PR may be about in the future. Because apparently that’s no easy feat when you’re a insecure and introverted bureaucracy that usually addresses others by shouting at them through a megaphone.
Dec 31st, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, Edelman, PR | No Comments
I just read this post by Richard Edelman and decided to blog my thoughts here, instead of posting a very lengthy comment.
Edelman discusses how PR will be forced to find new avenues of discourse in the future if it wants to reach those people who have largely withdrawn from the traditional media’s area of influence. Institutional news sources - television, newspapers, “big news” websites - base their authority on their institutional status. This made sense while the role of speaker and listener (e.g. The New York Times vs. its readers) were markedly distinct from one another and individuals from neither party could directly communicate with one another. The voice of the institution provided a source of stability that individuals could not provide - back when people actually placed a lot of trust in institutions. Not only has this trust been significantly eroded over the last decades (think corporate or government scandals a la Enron) but additionally the digital media has made it possible to communicate much more efficiently with other individuals independent of time and place. The resources and empowerment that previously could only be provided by the organization (again, think the New York Times and its printing presses) are now in the hands of the individual. Additionally, we now trust other individuals much more than we did in previous times, when hierarchy, abstraction and structure were seen as absolutely imperative categories and organizations were the means through which strangers could interact with a certain measure of stability (provided by the institution) and without breaching social norms.
How does this relate to PR and blogging? I believe that the central challenge to PR in an environment characterized by direct and unstructured communication is to figure out where the voice of the individual and the voice of the institution intersect. If the institutional voice is dead, consolidating concepts such as corporate identity have lost their relevance. Institutions would be largely characterized by the individuals they employ, and they would change significantly every time the team changes. But if the institutional voice is not dead, I wonder what exactly it can sound like in an environment like the blogosphere, where we are always talking to other individuals, not to brands or claims. What is too personal for business blogs? Why are fake blogs such a taboo? And does a company actually benefit from a talented blogger, or does an interesting personality eventually drown out the company in the perception of the readers?
Let me know what you think.
Oh, and a Happy New Year to everyone! 
Dec 1st, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, PR | No Comments
The sculpture on the left shows what became the basis of a traditional Japanese saying: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The Three Wise Monkeys, first depicted above the door of a 17th century shrine, embody the belief “that if we do not hear, see or talk evil, we ourselves shall be spared all evil” (wikipedia).
I think it is safe to assume that the Japanese (or possibly Chinese) artist who carved the three monkeys was thinking of everyday transgressions such as gossip and slander, not of PR and corporate blogging, when he conducted his work. But there’s an interesting analogy there. Many companies seem to believe in their own version of the wise-monkey approach: if we don’t publicly acknowledge criticism it doesn’t hurt us - it practically doesn’t exist. And even where criticism is acknowledged it is still imperative that no representative of the company ever communicates in a fashion that is potentially damaging to The Message, that strange one-size-fits-all PR hat that supposedly contains the essence of what the brand or company is. The need to wear a communicative makeup that offends nobody (and, as some believe, also appeals to nobody) arises because of two basic problems: a) it is unclear who can speak on behalf of the company (just PR? customer service? the CEO?) and b) it is unclear who is listening outside of it. A large corporation is a very complex entity. The decision of how to represent it must be coordinated and planned, and most people feel that this is not something every single employee can do for himself. The way the company presents itself cannot depend fully on the presentation of its employees; there must be guidelines of some sort.
But there is an inherent problem with the entire concept. The Message was created because of the specific limitations that a large and complex organization faces when seeking to communicate with an equally complex set of stakeholders (customers, competitors, shareholders), often far removed in terms of geography, language and culture. These constraints meant that the communication was largely unidirectional (company -> stakeholder), making it unnecessary to be able to respond to criticism. It also had to be as universally effective as possible and therefore target the mass rather than the individual.
What has changed (or, is still in the process of changing) is how individuals all over the world are able to communicate with each another rapidly, directly and efficiently. This is of course not news - it’s basically what appears to characterize the 21st century - but it poses a specific challenge to organizations. Because they feel the need to somehow streamline their communicative practices they are reluctant to give full control to the individual employee in an interaction with outsiders. The trouble is, however, that only individuals can communicate interpersonally - brands and companies can’t talk - and the way in which these individuals present themselves will never be in perfect accord with The Message, because the The Message is a ultimately a mirage designed out of sheer necessity.
How does this relate to the beginning of my ramble, the three wise monkeys? The monkeys represent the idea that if we keep away from bad things they cannot harm us. Traditional corporate PR seems to largely depend on the same presumption: as long as our Message is positive and we do not allow deviation from it in our communication, we are safe. But of course that’s not true - there’s criticism out there and it is voiced publicly now, for all the world to see and hear. Staying away is likely to make matters worse, as staying quiet also communicates something. But getting involved in a controversial discussion, acknowledging failure, promising improvement are things that only individuals can do. The concept of the unified, one-size-fits-all company image is suited for brochures and TV ads, but not for social interaction. A more idiosyncratic picture of companies will eventually emerge - more idiosyncratic, but perhaps also more truthful, more realistic, characterized by the actual people who are the company. I don’t see why human imperfection, criticism and similar blemishes on the corporate face must be avoided at all costs. Underneath the makeup there might just be a human being.
Note: I’ve used various bits and pieces read over the last week for this post. Sources of inspiration include: Doc Searls, Judy and Heather Leigh.
Nov 23rd, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, Jonathan Schwartz, PR, Robert Scoble | No Comments
I just came across this short article in the Guardian, posted last week. It follows the usual modus operandi of mentioning Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwartz (and Thomas Mahon of English Cut fame) and goes on to quote Debbie Weil numerous times (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
But the real gem is right at the beginning of the piece:
When The Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone started his corporate blog earlier this year, he was hailed as a cutting-edge chief executive; a man prepared to open up the inner workings of his company to the wider world and willing to communicate directly with his customers.
But that was April, when Britain’s biggest mobile phones retailer was riding high on a wave of favourable publicity about its “free” TalkTalk broadband offer.
Scroll forward a few months and the web is full of tales of “My TalkTalk Hell” as the group struggles to cope with the demand it so badly under-estimated, leaving thousands of customers angry and frustrated.
So what did Dunstone do at the height of the crisis? He simply stopped blogging. From September 1 until earlier this week - two and a half months - he failed to make a single entry. His post this Monday largely consists of an apology for his lengthy absence and a reassurance that the broadband supply problems are being worked out.
Ouch. If there’s one general, universal rule of business blogging it’s in the midst of a crisis, silence is not golden. Posting positive messages while the sailing is smooth is fine, but if there’s any time when a blog is almost indispensable, it’s when things go awry. Why? Because a blog is by far the best channel to make clear beyond doubt that
a) you recognize that there’s a problem
b) you’re sorry
If you aren’t convinced that those two aspects are extremely relevant, ask these guys about it. It’s a bit like Seth Godin once pointed out in a very interesting presentation at Google. Godin shocked his listeners by telling them something both harsh and true: nobody cares about your product. I believe he later qualified the statement - obviously a lot of people do care about Google’s products - but in assuming a complete lack of interest and “passion” on the side of customers regarding the phone service, dog food or toilet paper that you sell, you’re usually on the safe side. And the same largely holds true for companies. If wireless provider X is reliable and moderately priced, will I actively seek out X CEO’s blog to add my praise? Not too likely. But once things go wrong - once I’m frustrated and annoyed and quite sure that nobody is doing anything at all about my problem - then I’m going to post a comment on the company blog and make sure that I’m heard.
Silence leaves a barn door open for interpretation. Explaining and apologizing are basic social abilities - a lack of them indicates that you don’t understand how interpersonal interaction works, or (even worse), that you understand quite well but don’t care.
Mr. Dunstone didn’t realize that he was saying a whole lot by not saying anything. Don’t make that mistake.
