Last week, after we published a chapter entitled Survival of the Publicists, we received a good deal of unfavorable feedback that was split into two camps, one of which argued that we had been too kind to some PR practitioners we had spotlighted favorably in a chapter that wonders if PR as it is currently being practiced may be among the casualties of the blogging revolution. The other group argued, that despite my 25 years in the field, we were clueless as to what it was all about. Among the latter group was Trevor Cook, a director of the Sydney-based PR firm of Jackson Wells Morris, whom Robert and I thought took an intelligent and constructive approach in trying to dissect our chapter point by point. As a result we will be making some changed to the chapter, including excerpts of Trevor's additional comments which he submitted at our request. They are printed in full here:
"Blogging and podcastng offer exciting communication opportunities, but they will not completely displace existing media nor will they change the traditional role of public relations.
From a PR point of view, blogging and podcasting are important because they allow practitioners to communicate directly with audiences, free of the mediation, constraints and pitfalls of traditional media.
In fact, many of the aspects of PR that people lament – spin, bland messages and corporate speak – are simply efforts to negotiate the media’s privileged gatekeeper role without getting trampled by journalistic elephants.
The media is driven by the need to create revenue-producing audiences and, unfortunately, the best way to do that is with stories highlighting conflict, scandal, shock and lots of other negative stuff. The desire for big audiences also leads to coverage that lacks depth or nuance.
On the other hand, a positive media story is very valuable to a company because it delivers a third-party endorsement. Even with the decline in confidence in traditional media, this endorsement effect remains significant. Today, bloggers provide some additional opportunities for third-party endorsement.
With blogs and podcasts, PR practitioners can provide information about companies, their products and strategies, directly to anyone interested and we can talk with diverse micro audiences, as well as the bigger ones sought by the media. Through blogs and podcasts, we can easily and cheaply provide a lot more information on a lot more topics.
Even better, we can now provide our version first, with people commenting afterwards rather than the first version being something that is constructed, and often distorted, by the biases of a particular media outlet.
Hopefully, in the relatively calm spaces of our blogs, we can go on to have genuinely constructive conversations with customers and citizens – something rarely possible in an overwhelmingly negative media environment characterized by brief attention spans.
The current audiences for blogs and podcasts are tiny, compared to TV, radio and print media. What’s more, traditional media is still a lot more accessible and credible to the general population. Unfortunately, bloggers still carry the stigma of their early popularity with teenagers and political ranters.
Blogger credibility and readerships will grow strongly over the next decades, but blogs and podcasts are never going to replace traditional media, which are already adapting to and adopting the new technologies.
Only in rare circumstances, usually in IT, will PR practitioners be able to use exclusive blog & podcast strategies. In the future, all communication strategies will be some mix of old and new media. Those strategies will be richer and more diverse because of the inclusion of blogs and podcasts, but they won’t be essentially different.
PR has always been about ‘accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative’. Companies will not use blogs and podcasts to highlight or perpetuate discussions about negatives. Though they will use them to counter negatives covered on other blogs or in traditional media.
Nevertheless, the enlarged and relaxed spaces provided by the blogosphere will hopefully encourage companies to use more authentic voices and to be less stressed about the ‘untidiness’ that is inevitable when people converse naturally. But freeing-up corporate communications will require long and difficult cultural change processes. It won’t just happen.
For the PR industry, blogs and podcasts not only provide some additional, and often better, ways of communicating they also mean that there will be a lot more communication with a lot more people on a lot more topics. In that environment, far from facing doom, PR is likely to boom."
