Analysing blogs within the public relations industry

As our task is to write a blog on a weekly basis, I thought it would be fitting to examine the use of blogs within the public relations (PR) profession. Although there is little academic research on this subject, I have gathered as much credible content as possible. Away we go then …

Key facts and figures

·       It is known that the term “weblog” was created by Jorn Barger in 1997 arising from the   amalgamation of two words “web” and “log” (Kaiser et al., 2007).
·       1999: The year that the free blogging platform Blogger was launched, which then went on to be bought buy Google in 2003.
·       More than 14 million people worldwide keep a personal diary on the Internet and a further 100 million (one third of the active Web universe) read blogs habitually (Gordillo, 2007, cited Xifra and Huertas, 2008).
·       Ninety per cent of blogs are interactive (Lenhart, 2006, cited Kent, 2007).
·       Blogs promote the notion of “thinking by writing”
(Nardi et al., 2004, p. 45).
·       Hundreds of blogs are weeks ahead of the mainstream media when reporting stories in their own industry/profession.
·       153 million+: Is the estimated number of blogs identified as of January 11, 2011 (BlogPulse).

Introduction

The traditional role of media gatekeepers is experiencing drastic change (Pavlik, 2008) in the age of consumer-generated content.

Interactive blogs and other forms of social media were derived from the introduction of Web 2.0, described by Phillips and Young (2009, p. 12) as a space for symmetrical communication: a platform that aids the transfer of knowledge and conversations and a place where people can easily mix and match both. Hence, blogs provide organisations with an effective environment in which to create dialogue and communicate directly with publics and stakeholders, without the mediation of traditional gatekeepers. Therefore, they allow users, clients, opponents and competitors to communicate freely with each other, with the potential to create a discourse that is largely outside the control of the subject (Phillips and Young, 2009, p. 7).

Blog characteristics

On the one hand, blogs enable professionals to analyse the online market and ascertain the opinions of their audience in order to measure public perception of a business, product or service. On the other, they are a major technique for organisations to actively participate in symmetrical communication, either by posting comments on other blogs or creating one’s own (Xifra and Huertas, 2008).  

Figure 1 - Key elements of blogs (Baxter et al., 2010).

Conversation is key

It is the “conversational nature” (Lee et al., 2008, cited Baxter et al., 2010) of blogs that makes them appealing for individual’s to exchange views and opinions about issues of mutual interest.

Blogs employ threaded dialogue, creating an environment where individuals, groups, and organisations can interact. Therefore, blogs facilitate ‘dialogic relationships’ between users (Kent and Taylor, 1998). This exists when all parties involved in the communication process are contributing equally and with the aim to build relationships. Furthermore, dialogic communication requires open pubic discourse and a commitment from PR practitioners to place a high value on public opinion (Kent and Taylor, 1998).

Surfing the ‘blogosphere’

Blogs are useful for research, issue monitoring, and environmental scanning. When unanticipated issues, legislation, or events emerge, organisations can search through the archives of blogs for information, reader sentiment, links to other useful information, and so on, just as an organisation might examine relevant scholarly information, conduct interviews or search other archives and databases for information (Kent, 2005).

Monitoring blogs can be one way of coming to understand the world-view of diverse individuals and publics. Organisations are able to discover how people are interpreting and responding to organisational events, messages, and activities before such information reaches the mainstream media and news outlets. This means PR professionals can formulate better, more compelling responses.

There are software applications called ‘aggregators’ that will automatically gather data from blogs and other Web sites. Aggregators are very easy to use and anyone who can use e-mail can figure out how to use one.

Many blogs are produced using “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) feeds. RSS uses a programming language called XML to convert Web content into an easily viewed text-based format. Aggregators collect RSS feeds so that content can be read more efficiently.  The principle of RSS is a lot like having a personalised newspaper, one that only provides content that you want to read. Using an RSS aggregator allows PR professionals to quickly sort through information from many media sites, organisations, and bloggers. Aggregators give professionals the ability to monitor what is being said by hundreds of sources, individuals, and publics on a minute-by-minute basis (Kent, 2007). Thus, aiding the crisis communications process to provide messages that are densely formulated and in turn, more effective.

Reputation is at stake

The ‘blogosphere’ is a force that needs to be paid close attention to by organisations. Bloggers can wreck havoc on reputations, like when Jeff Jarvis posted repeatedly on BuzzMachine about his faulty Dell laptop, known as the ‘Dell-Hell’ saga. On the other hand, they can create ‘the next big thing’ like when the immensely popular blog BoingBoing covered a product called “InstaSnow” leading to drastic increase in traffic and sales. 

Insta Snow - YouTube Video.



The ‘power of the people’ has become the ‘power of the bloggers’ (Spencer, 2004).

Influencing publics

The power of blogs stems from the network effect. When an expert blogger makes a point that has value to a wider audience, the word spreads (‘word of mouse’) and the topic can be significantly blogged about (Phillips and Young, 2009, p. 12). This has profound consequences for organisations and PR professionals.

Blogs bring homogenous groups of individuals and publics together. Thus, from a PR standpoint, blogs represent the ultimate in public segmentation: coherent groups of individuals/professionals who share a common interest.

Reaching the choir is useful when an organisation is trying to influence opinion leaders, innovators and early adopters (Rogers, 1995, cited Kent, 2007). Blogs offer organisations another route for sharing their positions in a somewhat controlled fashion and many mainstream businesses such as Nokia, Ford and HP have taken advantage of the medium (Kent, 2007).

Using blogs as a way to influence individuals and publics is one of the most frequently mentioned characteristics of blogs by PR practitioners (Edelman, 2005, cited Kent, 2007).  Allowing or encouraging visitors to an organisation’s Web site in order to participate in how online news is framed is possibly the greatest strength of blogs and the feature of the most importance to PR practitioners (Kent, 2007).

Blogs promote democracy

Hiebert (2004, cited Xifra and Huertas, 2008) believes that blogs foster democracy because they restore dialogue and participative communication in the public sphere, in turn, preserving the role of PR by means of two-way communication. Brown (2009) advocates, “We are seeing the democratisation of the means production, distribution and exchange”, through the rise in user-generated content, as social networks are transformed into vast public spaces and word of mouth drives influence. Web 2.0 has made our conversations increasingly digital.

Corporate blogs

As social media is about talking and not selling, blogs are a great way to include personality within a cold, corporate website.

Organisational blogs can be categorised into five different types: employee blogs; group blogs; executive blogs; promotional blogs and newsletter blogs (Lee et al., 2008, cited Baxter et al., 2010).

With Google and other search engine sites favouring sites that are regularly updated, blogs are very likely to boost a company’s presence in search rankings in a way that a traditional corporate website will not, and therefore the idea of a corporate blog can be very compelling. However, businesses are often nervous about naked conversations that take place in and around blogs and there have been cases where careless comments have hit a corporate share price.

A lot of companies are making the mistake that blogging is publishing. Blogging is two-way and crucially, it’s the audience that decides what’s read, what gets linked to and in turn, what is deemed successful. Therefore, it makes sense to listen to the conversations which target consumers are having and then shape a blog around them.

PR practitioners should never set up a blog in favour of a client by pretending to be someone unconnected with the organization (Brown, 2009). Apart from being unethical, this practice, along with posting comments and contributing to forums whilst cloaking your identity or not declaring an interest is often referred to as ‘astroturfing’. It is likely that you will get found out, leading to significant damage to a brand or organisation. It goes without saying that you should also avoid the more extreme version of this, known as ‘sock puppetry’, the practice of posting entries under several different false names to make something appear more popular than it is.

In 2005, part of the L’Oreal cosmetics empire produced a fake blog called ‘Journal de ma Peau’, to promote an anti-wrinkle product called Peel Microabrasion. It was a testimony of a woman called Claire, who had great experiences with the product and claimed it improved her skin. Claire had been invented by an advertising agency. The company received so many complaints in just two months it was forced to replace the made up Claire with real-life bloggers who described their genuine experiences. 

Blogger engagement

The social web provides us with tools for engaging with bloggers that were unavailable to us in our dealings with journalists. A good example of how we can do this is by using a micro-blog like Twitter to pitch our story (Brown, 2009). On the other hand, I believe that PR practitioners can also engage with bloggers in the same way they do with journalist contacts – by email and telephone and on the odd occasion by actually meeting. However, the most popular bloggers receive over 300 hundred emails a day from PR people and unless they are targeted, interesting and appropriate, they are more than likely going to be blocked forever.

Conclusion

This post identifies blogs as an essential part of any PR practitioner’s toolkit. They have numerous uses from monitoring ‘word of mouse’ to information sharing to influencing key publics. Their rapid and continuous rise in popularity means they are becoming increasingly more important within the PR industry and building relationships with expert bloggers is becoming critical, especially for digital agencies.

The power of the ‘bloggosphere’ is not to be underestimated and many organisations have learnt the hard way. Organisations shouldn’t be tempted to jump on the blog bandwagon before learning exactly how to use them and establishing what the goals and objectives for using them are.

Remember, do not blog for the sake of it, blog for a reason.

I will leave you with a question that is sure to get you thinking. At what point does an innovation (in this instance blogging) become an everyday business practice, such as the Internet or wireless telephones?