Big blogger is watching you! Reputation management in an opinionated, hyperlinked world

Communication World, July-August, 2004 by Angelo Fernando

Blogs are the new Fourth Estate. This nascent hyperlink-laden new media format is really a global inter-network of information, rumour, research and media deconstruction--an inter-net within the Internet. Bloggers are the eyes and ears of the world, encroaching on what was once the role of journalists and watchdog organizations. They often take it upon themselves to keep tabs on politicians, entertainers, environmentalists and lobbies. They could soon be monitoring your organization as well!

Gary Bivings, founder of the Bivings Group, a hot-shot PR firm, knows all about that. Bivings has written on and follows blogs. His firm has been closely watched, and pilloried online, by people keeping tabs on Monsanto, one of his clients.

Or, consider blogger Tim Withers. He began the "adopt-a-journalist" phenomenon, tracking every word written by New York Times reporter Jody Wilgoren. His analysis of her column is now blogged on a dedicated web site called the "Wilgoren Watch" (http://wilgorenwatch.blogspot.com).

Then there's Kevin Drum, who maintains a blog at Calpundit.com (which has since moved to The Washington Monthly) that analyzes everything that comes out of the White House press briefings and the media coverage of the George W. Bush campaign.

What's going on here? Fact checking or muckraking? Unfortunately, blogging does not fall into convenient slots and cannot be explained away in journalism-speak. Blogs are neither the stuff of "60 Minutes" nor "The Drudge Report," but a form of "citizen journalism."

The best way to get a handle on the scope of blogs is to survey what's out there and view them within some broad classifications--even though they certainly will be broken out into a dozen categories by year end.

Journalist blogs are quite the rage--a reason why many journalism schools such as Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, have started paying attention to blogs. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC have journalists blogging away. The most invigorating thing about blogging is that readers provide instant feedback. For journalists, it gets them up-close with their "former audience," a term used by Dan Gillmor, blogging for the San Jose Mercury News (http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor). Others say it gives them an opportunity to cover stories their employer will not assign them for a variety of reasons.

Then there are citizen journalists who are making sure that what's important and newsworthy isn't determined by media organizations, but by people in their local communities. They aren't necessarily professional scribes. "Trial Diary" (www.trialdiary.com) is a true "log" of Donna Larsen, a communication manager, and Hilary Mohr, a philosophy student, reporting on a complex murder trial under way in Seattle.

Corporate blocs may seem tame by comparison, but if you read between the lines there is a high probability that this genre will explode (see sidebar). The best example of a corporate blog is maintained by Microsoft employee Robert Scoble, better known as "Scobleizer" in blogspace (http://scoble.weblogs.com). Scoble's "Weblog Manifesto" has caught the attention of many in the PR and marketing world, if only because it is written in the style of "The Cluetrain Manifesto."

As for political blogs, these are the wallpaper of the blogosphere, and take the form of daily rants. In the U.S., the "Dean For America" blog got people's attention as a mobilizing force, more than a news source. It now has its counterpart in the John Kerry and George W. Bush campaigns. More interesting are the blocs maintained by politicos such as Australian Prime Minister John Howard, British Labor MP Tom Watson and Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the media savvy vice president of Iran's Parliamentary Legal Affairs. Howard, for instance is often irreverent and folksy; Abtahi speaks with passion about religion and education. Unlike official web sites, their blogs come off as hype-free and non-posturing.

Blogging in PR, Marketing Communications and Advertising is less of a place to rant, and more of a format to uplift the profession and push the envelope. "People who read blogs are thought-leaders in the community," says John Cass, an early PR blogger, who maintains one for the community-building opportunity it gives him.

How does all this affect you, the communicator, nicely crafting a press release in your PR or marketing department this morning, ready to upload it to PRNewsWire.com?

Stop thinking of "distribution" channels and start thinking of "conversation" channels. Bloggers use a mechanism called "syndication," which is a fancy name for linking to other blogs and news sources. This incestuous information sharing is sometimes derided as creating an echo chamber effect. From a PR point of view, it also amplifies a message, spreading it in real time. People don't just read blogs; they contribute to the post, tell others about them and link to them. Search engines, which often rank sites based on the number of links to the sites' pages, naturally favor blogs. Therein lies the opportunity and the challenge. In blogspace, these conversations could take place with or without your approval.