Reprinted from the October 2005 issue of Frontline magazine with permission by the International Public Relations Association.
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Under the auspices of PR firm Ketchum, a panel of experts came together to discuss issues relating to "Managing Reputation in a Blogger’s World." Ketchum EMEA CEO Jon Higgins recounts key points in the debate.
Of all the new and emerging media channels today, most people now identify blogs as the one most likely to become mainstream, and there is growing evidence that this is already the case. A recent report by Technorati, a website that indexes blogs, estimated that there are more than 14 million blogs in existence now and that some 900,000 new blog postings are appearing every day. On top of that, the blogosphere is estimated to be doubling in size every five and a half months.
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As a result, companies must now take into account that even if 99.9% of the new blog postings that go online each day are not credible or relevant, as many as 90 new ones are appearing that could be saying something demeaning about an organization, grinding an axe, or leaking confidential information, or, on the positive side, endorsing an idea, getting behind a candidate, or enabling a CEO to reach new audiences.
To help businesses and public relations practitioners deal with this transformation of the media landscape, in June 2005 Ketchum London brought together a panel of blog experts to discuss how to integrate a blog strategy into a corporate communications strategy. The panel session, “Managing Reputation in a Blogger’s World,” was hosted by myself and Suzanne Sinden, Global Technology Practice Director, Ketchum London, and offered the insights of four leading thinkers.
The event built on the June launch of Ketchum Personalized Media, a global service that advises organizations to know how, why and when to integrate the growing roster of online and wireless media – from blogs and podcasts to mobile marketing – into their overall communications strategy.
The panel included these four media experts:
- Stephen Coleman - Professor of eDemocracy at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Fellow of Jesus College Oxford. He leads the eDemocracy program, which seeks to develop innovative ways of using new interactive technologies to reconnect Parliament with citizens and encourage participation in the democratic process.
- Simon Waldman - Director of Digital Publishing at the Guardian Newspapers Limited and the manager responsible for The Guardian’s blog strategy. Guardian Unlimited currently has four blogs.
- David Phillips - A leading authority on Internet reputation and relationship management, and author or several books – Managing Your Reputation in Cyberspace, Online Public Relations 2001, and Blazing Net Shine. In 1999, David was appointed leading consultant for Internet Reputation Services Limited and Chairman of the Joint U.K. Institute of Public Relations and PR Consultants Association Internet Commission.
- Nick Lockett - A member of the high-technology and intellectual property firm DL Legal. He is an expert on the legal issues associated with blogging and a regular media commentator on all online blogging legal issues.
Here are the opening remarks the panelists gave on the state of blogs today and what considerations companies should make in managing reputation within this new blogging environment.
Simon Waldman
We have seen an explosion of new things happening on the Internet where blogs and all the other new media channels are found, and the question is ‘Where does this all fit?’ The best place to describe it is that it fits between the gaps of everything that has gone before and everything that is completely new.
To expand on that, for any organization -- and ourselves as both a newspaper publisher and a company -- we are both putting content out there while also being concerned about what people say about that content and what people say about us as an organization.
For any organization, when it comes to blogs you have to think about a few things. Firstly, how you can use it as a publishing tool. Secondly, how do you monitor, understand and potentially influence what is being said about you in what is horribly called the blogosphere?
Our experience with using blogs as a publishing tool falls in two areas. Traditionally there were those who tried, with journalist tools being quite crude, to simply have a new story, feature or news-in-brief, which completely falls off the radar. Actually giving journalists blogs provides quite a neat tool, enabling them to cover rapidly happening stories that are quite intricate and build communities around them.
We have done that with quite a lot of editorials around the election as well as specialist topics like computer gaming and technology. And we also have news blogs where we allow people to have a slightly closer glimpse into what we call ‘What’s Happening at The Guardian.’ The Observer newspaper has its own editorial blog in which it explains the editorial decisions being made on a Saturday night. And I keep a blog myself, which isn’t done on a Guardian brand although it’s done with full responsibility as a director of the company.
Projecting Ideas
For example, if I go and give a speech at a conference in some godforsaken corner of the world that is attended by a couple of dozen people, previously that would have lived and died there. However, if the speech then gets put on to a blog, it takes on a new life of its own. And if the ideas are interesting, then they get picked up. For us who try and think a lot about thought leadership, it’s a very good way to project good ideas rather than simply putting the speech into a press release, which no one reads.
But the biggest impact for us as publishers is the way we are talked about. This includes the impact that it is going to have on us as a brand, the impact blogs will have on the way we see ourselves, and the impact that the collection of links and comments that open about you as a publisher will determine the way you appear on the Internet and the way you are discovered on Google. That is something we are starting to spend a lot more time monitoring and reflecting on. And we think that you are as strong and vibrant a publisher as the conversations that happen around you.
In the Web world, you want to be talked about and linked to, discussed and debated. In a world where information is increasingly being commoditized, you want to stand strong as a brand in the conversations, that happen around you, and that’s a really powerful thing. This is a new area, it’s difficult, and brings with it all sorts of risk and complexity, but it is also fascinatingly exciting. And for us, it has given probably more energy to the way we view the Internet than anything else that has happened creatively in the last few years.
Stephen Coleman
I think this goes right back to what we first thought the Internet was about. At the beginning of the Internet we had these big questions. Is it like television? Is it like the telephone? And a lot of people, and I think particularly PR professionals saw it conveniently as being like television -- you could get your hands on it and control it more easily, and to some extent that has worked.
If you have got good strategies it works better, if you have bad strategies it doesn’t work well. And that is the same for governments, the same for parliamentary candidates and the same for corporations.
Today, most people still use the Internet as a peer-to-peer network. The most popular use of the Internet still is e-mail -- people writing to other people. During the last election I did some research and I asked ‘Did you go to a political party website?’ And only 10% of people did. ‘Did you go to a local candidate’s website?’ And only 3% of people did. ‘Did you write to a friend or member or your family?’ About 50% of people did. ‘Did you get an e-mail from somebody else telling you about something they were thinking?’ About 40% of people did. So it is this movement away from the megaphone to the radar, which is where I would locate blogs.
I agree with what Simon said: if you are a company you need to be sensitive to the signals being conveyed in blogs. And you can’t be sensitive in crude ways -- ratings monitoring in the way that one could do with television and radio. You can’t say how many people have looked at this blog and therefore that tells me everything. The questions you have got to ask is who looked at it, what did they say, did they link to it and did they tell their friends about it? So this is where it’s back to me being an academic and a researcher.
How Best To Monitor
I look at two kinds of ways of monitoring this. One of them is by studying data streams. In other words, we want to know what happens when somebody sets up a blog, who looks at it, who links to it, who talks about it, and what kind of word do they commonly use when they talk about? We actually know most of that. Web network analysis tells us these kinds of things.
The second way of monitoring is called heat analysis, which takes the temperature of a discussion to tell us how deep a discussion is going. When people start talking about it, do they joke about it, do they get angry about it, is it mainly women talking about it, are there any young people talking about it, and what kind of things happen at the end of that discussion? Do they say I am never going to buy that or I am always going to buy that or I am cool if I buy that?
So I think that the biggest problem for PR and communications professionals is not actually advising on how to run blogs, because in a way the advice on how to run blogs I can give in two words: be sincere. Blogs are not performative.
If you run a blog and pretend to be someone that you are not, then it will not work. Writing the blog is not the difficult part. The difficult part is once you have one, asking the questions about who is looking at it and listening to it, and how is it actually affecting the world of communication on a peer-to-peer level? This is quite discrete, often invisible, but incredibly significant in terms of its consequences.
David Phillips
Some of the ground rules haven’t changed at all. If you think in terms of what the Internet does, it makes our organizations much more transparent. We have to get out there and show much more of what we did than before.
For example, there is no reason at all why British Airways should make available to its competitors and to you, precisely where a piece of baggage is in the world, but they do because it is easy and helps their stakeholders manage their logistics. So the Internet makes us much more transparent and we do it in all sorts of ways as an organization. That transparency means that firstly people can take a greater interest and secondly the Internet makes our organizations more porous.
You only have to be Jo Moore* to recognize precisely how porous it can be, because what happens is what you do creeps out of organizations, and the hard borders of organizations are now fractioning very rapidly. Really, what we are talking about today is the ability of the Internet to take ideas, concepts, products and so on and to spread them around, generate opinions about them, and act as an agent of ideas and brand values.
Blogs have moved things on from where some of us were some time ago with UseNet and discussion lists and allowed us to have a faster, further-reaching mechanism by which we can exchange our ideas. So blogs add to this Internet agency capability that we were talking about five years ago in public relations and now affect just about everybody.
Emotional Attachment
So when we start looking at blogs in a context that we know and understand, broadly the new answer is that it’s the niceties that are slightly different. Because if we look at the relationship that people have between themselves and their newspapers and magazines, it is a very personal relationship.
It’s like a friend dropping in. We have an emotional attachment to our newspapers. We don’t have the same sort of emotional attachment to a lot of online publishers, but I am getting the impression now that we will get an emotional attachment. If you like that same friend dropping in to Web logs, what happens is you will go seek them out and go and watch them on a regular basis -- if they make time to do it. And that’s the critical thing -- if people can make the time. If you think about all the different pressures on you to live in a communications world, making time to have this emotional connection is really important.
So when we are talking about blogs, we are talking about something that is slightly different than other forms of online communication because there is a much tighter personal attachment. I think that is really why they have been so successful. So at that point we start saying, oh, hang on a minute, are we catching hold of people’s emotions, because that’s really quite important.
Nick Lockett
Well, I don’t think there is anything new legally about blogs. They are just another form of a Web page and all of the legal issues involved have already been dealt with over the last 10 years. I started doing this in about 1990 when you couldn’t even get graphics on the Internet. There is nothing really legally new there with the exception of one or two quirks on employment law.
I think that the real difficulty that is there is a change of control, which the in-house management and lawyers don’t like. You are getting a degree of insight in to the field of management that was never available before and that creates all sorts of problems with confidentiality and leakage of trade secrets. The underlying law was already there. It is a question of how do you apply it and how do you understand enough about what is going on with a blog that you can manage it from a corporate view. Or, if you have employees running it, managing it from that perspective.
There are big differences if it is an employee blog as opposed to a corporate blog, and you are now getting corporate blogs emerging from sectors within the organization that don’t necessarily talk to the PR department. Management is getting very worried about that.
There are also these big issues about when and where it is a diary and when and where is it part of the Web or a blogging session that’s personal and how much does it overlap into the company? When you start to make policies, you create the same problem because what you get is corporate ability to say we would like this amended in the blog, we would like this extracted.
Google in a Pickle
Look at the Google site. Google fired one of its guys and a few weeks later it comes back slightly changed. Now Google clearly had control -- although they deny it -- but it is quite obvious they had some form of input into what went on back there. From a legal point of view that is a disaster because suddenly your corporate entity is able to control the blog of an employee and you incur the liability. The employee is also liable, but because the company has now got control, it is going to incur liability because it can control what’s on there. It keeps coming back to this thing that it is the ‘Big Brother’ view of the company from inside.
There are a number of quirks you have to watch for. For example, election law really hasn’t caught on yet to blogs, because they break election law. You get things like data stream analysis that we have heard about, which probably isn’t within the standard use of data protection, and the data protection controls you have in place. The whole issue of identity management and data stream analysis steps outside what we have conventionally had in the way of data protection controls.
Europe is already looking at an identity management directive to deal with electronic identity and is also going to have to tackle how data stream analysis is dealt with. If data stream analysis is near to perfection, what you get is the ability to snoop, and that impacts privacy, which is not currently caught by the data protection directives. Many of the city law firms don’t specialize in the area. Some of the terminology, like ‘DOSING,’ and so forth, just isn’t known by them, so they already have a problem when it comes to providing advice.
Copyright Changes
The last area we are about to see a massive change in is copyright. When it comes to visual media, there is clear copyright here and hence protection. But as we get into computerized possessing and extraction of metadata, what you are beginning to see is that you can extract metadata and it’s not quite clear yet what the legal implications are.
For example, if I take a Financial Times article and extract the core ideas from it and then write an article including those ideas, there is no breach of copyright. If it’s a research paper then, yes, I should be attributing the use of that article but it’s not a breach of copyright to take an idea -- you can’t copyright an idea. If you go to a judge and say this person has taken my Financial Times article -- they have taken the core parts out of it and they have written their own article and have included those parts -- the judge is going to throw you straight out of the door. But when you then go and take The Guardian database and extract the whole of the core metadata and put that into your own database, the judges are currently thinking that is a copyright breach. And in England they are probably right because it is a substantive part of the database.
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