I hear that a lot of PR agencies are trying to scare marketing directors about the perils of blogs. While there are risks to blogs, focusing unduly on the negative side is not a healthy long term strategy.
Blogs present an excellent opportunity for marketing directors to learn at first hand what customers think about particular issues and their products. It is a way of finding out the latest thinking and a relatively simple way of interacting with customers in real-time. In fact bloggers can act as highly effective online PR agents for companies if they are enthused about your company and what you are offering.
The reason why some PR agencies are talking up the risks of blogs is maybe because they are fearful of the changes that blogs are bringing in. Blogging is changing fundamentally the way that corporates communicate. Highly packaged, controlled messages are not going to work well in the blogosphere because they don't enable conversations.
I've just bought The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil and in it she quotes Peter Hirshberg, executive vice president of Technorati, the blog search engine. Hirshberg says:
'The nature of corporate communications will change. The voice will change. Fifty years of highly structured corporate-speak, of words that are poured over by teams of marcom and PR people will go away in favor of immediacy, plain talking and authenticity. It's not that corporate blogs will take off, it's that marketers will learn from bloggers how to speak in a human voice and this will show up in websites, in print advertising and on TV.
Current corporate-speak is a remant of one-way mass communication. It's stilted just as a soliloquy in Shakespeare seems stilted. Conversations are not speeches and soliloquies. As the audience and the customer become part of a two-way communication, corporations will learn to speak like people.'
Enlightened PR agencies should of course point out the risks of blogs and prepare their clients for what to do in a crisis but more significantly they should be working towards the future and encouraging marketers and corporate communications people to start entering into dialogues and conversations with bloggers. It will lead to a change in the language of business. But that's probably a good thing in the long run as companies will become more accessible to their customers and gain a better understanding of what their customers think and want.
