February 2007

I was in early. I started posting on my own blog in June of 2004. Bill French, who is a contributor to MarcomBlog, and I had a conversation back then about how his MyST technology platform created magical search engine results. He expressed that he and his partner had not constructed MyST to be a consumer tool…that it was invented for large corporate clients like Intel to be able to “tag” and “find” and “share” documents using an advanced XML format.

One of the ancilliary results was that MyST content did really well with Google searches because of their understanding of the various heuristics that Google used to give web pages a ranking. Soooo…MyST blogsite was created and MyST has done really well with it, particularly in the real estate vertical with www.realestateblogsites.com Again we’re talking three years ago…which is a lifetime is this Internet environment.

Between the time you enter and exit your college career at Auburn, you’ll see an increase in volume, intensity, technology advances, and “noise” that I never encountered at your age. When I entered SMU I was worried about two things: my track scholarship and girls. Although we weren’t as archaic as this YouTube video illustrates, I think you’ll both laugh and appreciate what it portrays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU

Blogging is cool. Content Management has advanced to give everyone the ability to create and distribute their own content. Determining whether the content you see is good or crap is up to you now. I used to be a television producer in my previous career and you had to pass through a lot of editors and filters before your face or your content made it to the airwaves. Now…anyone can push out content. The consequence is that most of it is crap. It’s fun to write and post and put your life on display in cyberspace…keep it up if that’s what you want to do. It has significant value to your careers in that you’re smarter about these tools than the people you’re competing with for jobs. Don’t underestimate that.

How does it (blogging) affect PR and business? There are a lot of committed contributors to MarcomBlog that will disagree with my statement here. I am convinced after 3 years of blogging that blogging is not a positive thing for business, rather it is a negative. Call me a pariah. But don’t say that I haven’t been there, done that, and reached a “qualified” decision.

1. Public Corporations: blogs are useless and irresponsible. No Corporate Communications person in their right mind would allow a C-level executive to blog. The Jonathan Schwartz’s of the World aside, it is not a sensible PR move to allow a top executive to share his thoughts in Cyberspace. Too much risk. Even the blog evangelists will agree with the numbers…the C-level execs within public companies are simply foolish to blog. The shareholders are watching. DISCLAIMER: I believe this should change but right now it ain’t happenin’.  

2. Private Companies: blogs can help with SEO (search engine optimization) for product lines, thought leadership, and other things. But if content management systems have advanced to the degree that they have, why do you need a “blog” to say what you want to say. Just use your freakin’ website to do it. A site is a site is a site. It doesn’t matter if you call it a website or a blog, the fact that the communicators now have control of it is what is important. Set your website up to have the ability for you to make content additions/changes right away. Offer up social tools such as comments, sharing, etc. and voila…you have a website with blog capabilities…who needs a blog?

3. Personal. We’ve talked about this. Post away to your heart’s content, but it doesn’t affect the business environment, UNLESS…you have an audience. Blogging is largely an exercise of EGO.

4. Monitoring the Blogosphere. This is where blogs can affect PR and business. As a PR professional, you’ll have to monitor blogs. Brushfires can start rapidly…and can intensify quickly. Evangelists and psychopaths can take a company’s reputation in a direction in a hurry on the Internet. There are software tools now and in the future that will allow you to monitor the “kookosphere” for your company or your client.

I was in early. Blogging takes time. You get sucked into thinking it is important for you to post and comment. It’s not. Live your life. Imagine the blogosphere as a resource…lots of people standing around on the street corner yelling about what they believe. When you need something from them…you can go out and hear it. When you don’t, you can ignore it. What happens when you blog a lot is that you begin to think that it matters. If you want a collection of your thoughts, write a diary. A REALLY SMALL percentage of blogs gain a sigificant audience…our MarcomBlog bloggers notwithstanding…after all they have you!

My advice is this:

1. Blog with caution. What you say is out there. You might change…but it won’t.

2. Understand that every industry goes through remarkable change. Communications has been more affected by the Internet than any other. Know the tools. Know that the industry changes slowly…a large percentage of the practitioners in the industry that you hope to enter don’t even undertstand RSS yet. You might get hired by a forward-thinking agency or company but it’s not likely to be because you know about blogging. Your impact will come later as the industry’s strategy catches up with the technology.

As I said earlier, I’m tired of blogging. I’m done. What I have to say…I’m going to keep it to myself. There is soooooo much noise out there. I’m tired of contributing to it. Bloggers tend to think that what they say matters. Maybe. There are reportedly over 50 millions blogs. Am I important because I had a few thousand regular readers to my blog? Not really.

In Conclusion: blogging is just this: posting content to the web using a content management system. If the company that you end up working for or represent has a good CMS for their website that the PR team can control, what’s the point of having a blog? Put your issues, mission, opinions, etc. right there on the website. So if you want to blog personally…blog away! Professionally it is useless. It is time consuming…it is outside of the core value prop of the communications professional, and it is prone to firememes and all sorts of other useless shit related to the PR blogosphere.

Enter with caution. Have fun. But don’t be fooled that it is necessary for your professional development. You are extremely fortunate to have Robert French to expose you to these things…you’re way ahead of your peers around the country. He has also tasked you with the responsibility of knowing whether and how to use these things.

I will contribute to MarcomBlog in the future but I’ll not be adding to my own blog. My writing is going to be private and I hope to publish a book. You can continue to send me communications at drambeau@thefuelteam.com

As Public Enemy wrote the lyrics for “He Got Game” for the 1998 movie:

“It might feel good
it might sound a little somethin’
but damn the game if it don’t mean nothin
what is game who got game
where’s the game in life behind the game behind the game
I got game
she’s got game
we got game
they got game
he got game
it might feel good
or sound a little somethin
“but fuck the game if it ain’t saying nothin”
 

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There’s been so much good discussion about the structure (or in this case re-structuring) of the press release. Todd Defren and his team at Shift Communications are carrying the torch on this quest…makes me think of Monty Python whenever I say that.

The Quest for the Holy Grail!
King Arthur: “We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master.” Soldier: “What? On a horse?” King Arthur: “Yes.” Soldier: “You’re using coconuts…” King Arthur: “What?” Soldier: “You’ve got two empty halves of coconut and you’re banging them together!”

This is not to suggest that Todd and his team are a bit nuts…far from it…merely that they are on a noble quest. Today they launched a template for a more social online newsroom, or in our parlance, MediaRoom. I applaud them for their efforts to keep this evolutionary thinking moving forward. Change takes time, particularly in industries that are highly regulated. In the last six years, my company has launched over 400 online newsrooms of some shape or size, many of those through our strategic partner, PR Newswire. Certainly back then and to a large degree still, education was the key to adoption. PR Communications professionals had to KNOW ABOUT the tools before they could use them.

New technology has to do a couple of things very clearly in order to see mass adoption. Tony Perkins, founder of the now defunct Red Herring Magazine, and editor of the new Always On Network, has some interesting insight in his blog post about avoiding another tech bubble. One of the key components of any new technology is that it takes something that people are already doing and saves them time and money.

That has always been the key value proposition of online mediarooms to the busy PR professional. They MUST post news releases to their websites for compliance and other reasons. They MUST (if they’re public) use the wire services to distribute said news. And historically that meant dealing with a busy webmaster or using a clunky html WYSIWYG tool to do it. Content management platforms have improved, PR pros have gotten more savvy, IT teams have become less gatekeepers and have allowed business units within their organization to use 3rd party vended solutions, price points have come down…and voila we have adoption of online mediarooms. Riding this wave and working personally with several hundred companies to implement these solutions has given me and my team a unique perspective…probably very similar to the experience base of the CCBN (now Thomson) team that has implemented thousands of IR websites since Reg FD became a reality.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been lobbying the SEC to make a blog post compliant as “disclosure.” Well guess what? Today TypePad, which powers a very large percentage of PR and corporate blogs, was completely down for an hour. Oops. The “new way” would have been a disaster.

Are online newsrooms useful for smaller or privately-held companies or non-profits or policy groups? Sure. Different value prop…they’re looking for publicity, promotion, sales, consensus-building, etc. But my experience base lies with the publicly traded corporation and in this environment, the concept of enabling every Tom Dick and Harry to mash up and spread your company’s news simply scares the bejesus out of them. Not interested. I’m convinced that at some point that will change and we will want to “turn on” the social elements of our MediaRooms much like Shift has suggested in their template. The technology is there…it’s the strategy that has not yet caught up with it.

As I mentioned before, new technology always begs those discussions until it reaches a tipping point. Usage and comfort always has to catch up with the tool. Remember how yucky it felt to drive your first car that had anti-lock brakes? I really missed the old controlled skid! I forgot…most of you probably don’t remember that!!!!

Education is the key. The news release is certainly not dead…nor is the traditional way of doing news distribution for thousands of companies and the bulk of communications professionals. Change is good and most certainly inevitable…like Agent Smith says in the first Matrix: “You hear that Mr. Anderson?… That is the sound of inevitability… It is the sound of your death… Goodbye, Mr. Anderson…” Keanu: “My name…is NEO!

You students are entering an exciting and rapidly changing world of communications. Remember that “new” isn’t always better or least isn’t better “right now”. Sometimes there are roadblocks (senior professionals stuck in their ways…regulatory concerns, etc.) that stand in the way of change.

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