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Oouf: The Dance Mix Bass sample courtesy of Canton's mixes. Oouf When Steve Gillmor explained that one of the reasons I gave the last Gillmor Gang a rating of four was because I'd have preferred to hear Steve's and Dan Farber's impressions of the Office 2.0 conference, Mike Arrington said: I'd almost like to try a dance mix of that... ;-) The best outcome in the aftermath I didn't want to think about the PR business today. You know I dislike it. But I was just thinking, after reading David Weinberger's post, that the best thing agencies or PR departments can do now is think of relating to the blogosphere as they think of relating to the financial world. If they're not specialists in financial PR, they fear it (and rightly so, because you can get your client in big legal trouble for what you say, if the client is publically traded or about to be). So, in agencies, everybody knows not to let anybody except the specialists go near it, and if they don't have an experienced person on staff, many will refer a piece of business like that to a specialist agency. I don't even know which Edelman office handled Wal-Mart, but I do know that offices of national agencies are very autonomous. They might report the gist of a campaign or a new client's work to headquarters, but people upstairs in another state rarely will get into the nitty-gritty of strategies and tactics. If the account seemed to need even a hint of financial PR, headquarters might, in its own interest, doublecheck to make sure the right, qualified people were working on it, even if it meant taking the trouble to bring in someone from another office or partnering with another firm. Probably the same kind of "I'd better not touch this," and "you'd better not touch this" wariness should come into play when an office takes on a project to influence the online world. If that attitude took hold, I suppose this whole brouhaha could be good news for certain specialists. (But I still think the blogging world is better off without PR types, of any stripe.) Is too David Weinberger says there is a place for PR in the blogosphere (and outlines his biases). "That it [Edelman PR] has gone so wrong in the Wal-Mart instances is an indication of just how different the Web is, and how difficult it is for an agency that has bet its future on getting the Web right to break free of its long-learned instincts. PR has a long road ahead of it." My adorable little smart ass Little guy: Pick up "North by Northwest" when you're out? Me: And who turned you on to NxNW? Little guy: Yes, Mom. You're my cultural savior. Is that what you were asking to hear? Desecrating genuine consumer enthusisam
It's fine for the organization to promote itself by latching on to a hot issue and hosting a discussion about it. But as far as I'm concerned, the group can claim no oversight status in the matter. They can declare Edelman to be in breach of its guidelines or not; it doesn't matter to this PR-person-turned-blogger, not one little bit. I have a problem with efforts like WOMMA's to teach "the art and science of amplifying genuine consumer enthusiasm," as the group's website tagline says. Its mission to build buzz about the act of building buzz will encourage marketers like the account team at Edelman to use blogs in half-clueless ways, and will end up creating public skepticism about blogging and bloggers in general. Marketers looking to "get in on" blogging by making it an additional wrench in the same old toolkit are going to render everything less genuine. Genuine enthusiasm doesn't need to be amped up. It's real. Report on it, but leave it alone, my former fellow flacks. Grassroots is just that; it bubbles up from communitites. You can't manufacture it or help it along, or it's not really grassroots anymore. It's not something that can be managed without befouling it, so don't try to manage it. Companies marketing products or services just need to make their own blogs and talk straight. That's the best way to get started in the blogosphere. I'd say leave the PR firms right out of it. An agency is only a different flavor of intermediation. For that matter, so is your marketing department. Disintermediation is what the wired world of consumers wants. Best not to rush into this world without grokking it. As you see from the Wal-Mart fallout, the penalty for trying to do it without getting it can be brutal -- net negative ROI. Go get yourself a copy of Cluetrain. If it doesn't make sense to you or it seems radical in a bad way, you're not ready to play in the blogosphere. Put the book away and take it out next year. If it still doesn't make sense to you or seems radical ... Rinse. Repeat. |
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