Marketing Technology

Tim Jackson, a CIPR diploma student, sent me a copy of the final report he submitted. Titled How are corporate weblogs affecting public relations practice? it seeks “to examine corporate blogging from a public relations perspective”, and does so rather well.

It focuses on three questions:

1. What are the benefits and risks of corporate blogging?
2. What are the underlying theories that can increase understanding of corporate blogging?
3. What are the best practices PR practitioners should follow in the blogosphere?

Tim came in to our offices last month to interview me for the study, and conducted an email interview with Richard Bailey. He also ran an online questionnaire that was emailed to 50 PR bloggers using Constantin Basturea’s list of PR blogs. Tom Murphy and Michael O’Connor Clarke both posted links to it.

His 74-item bibliography containing the usual suspects - and some more unusual ones - is extensive (worthy of a wiki itself, Tim?). I’m also grateful to him for visualising the matrix that we have created that helps companies decide who should be granted access to a corporate blogging platform, and how much control to exert over their blogging activities.

Our interview went to 70 minutes. Here are some of the things I apparently said that made the cut:

• On blogs: ”The easiest, most visible example of a wider trend around the fragmentation of media and audiences. Whether it’s about consuming products, news, media or information, there is a huge shift going on right now and blogs are just one tiny example of how that is manifesting itself.”
• On disintermediation: “If you have a conversation directly with someone, you’re going to learn more…respond better, and the outcome of that conversation is going to be a better one than if you were going through two or three different people.”
• On evaluating blogs: “Efforts to put all these metrics into a single number is misplaced. This is about qualitative measurement and what’s being said.”
• On blogs being a a refreshing alternative to existing corporate communications: “Consumers are tired with marketing and advertising: ‘we’re wise to what these big companies are trying to do, we don’t think it’s particularly genuine, we know how it works, and we know it’s not in our own interests.’”
• On new blogging/personalised media ‘practices’: “There needs to be a little more listening and less talking… very little listening goes on.”
• On putting blogging into perspective: “I don’t think there are millions of people out there who are going to put down their newspapers and say, ‘I’m going to get all my information and news content from blogs now.’”

As 6,973-word reports go, it’s pretty good. He concludes:

“The findings of this research strongly suggest that corporate blogging can make a substantial positive contribution to the practice of external corporate communications. The companies that are blogging successfully are reaping the rewards of better relationships with their stakeholders and enhanced corporate reputation. Controlling the risks of such unfiltered dialogue between employees and the outside world using a combination of trust, policies and guidelines is an enlightened act of management. This is a significant change from the command-and-control approach to corporate communications that was widespread in the past. However, these companies will not be closing down all other methods of corporate communication to concentrate solely on blogging, since blogs are additive to existing media, not replacements for it.”

If anyone wants to read the full report, I suggest you contact Tim directly (leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll let you have his details). If there’s enough demand, perhaps he’ll allow me to make it available here as a download.