Unspun

Jeremy Wagstaff has raised an inportant issue in his Loose Wire Blog on worldwide PR firm Edelman’s deal with Technorati. Essentially the deal is to offer localized versions of Technorati’s offering in German, Korean, Italian, French and Chinese.

This deal allows Edelman to get into the analytics of tracking conversations in the blogosphere, but being a typical journalist Jeremy worries whether this means that PR people have taken over the conversation.

It is an understandable suspicion but one founded more on the misperception that PR people are into spin, that they are still stuck in the mode of command-and-control one-to-many communications and that they haven’t realised that they are there to present only a good image of companies, no warts and all.

Just like there are bad journalists, there are bad PR practitioners who do all those awful stuff. They give PR a bad name. To be fair there are lots of awful PR practitioners around, just like the tons of mediocre and horrible journalists.

But where the best PR practitioners are concerned, it has always been and will always be about getting our clients to communicate with credibility — with or without the blogosphere.

Even in traditional PR the best practitioners end up being trusted advisors instead of being mere communications consultants. The end up advising the clients on what are or aren’t acceptable actions and decisions and often guide their clients to better and more responsible actions. Then they help the clients communicate. The communicationis the visible but tail end of the counselling process, that, if done well, very few people would even notice.

This aspect of PR will not change intrinsically with blogs. What will change is the tone and manner of communications, as well as the delivery mechanisms.

Arguably, if corporations get into the conversation then they do not need much of the command-and-control PR tactics being used today. The reason why they use it in the first place is to protect themselves against aggressive and hostile journalists who have wheat Sally Stewart, author of Media Training 101 and a former journalist, calls a Kindergarten Justice mindset.  To these journalists things are either black or white; you’re either guilty or your not; you succeeded or you’ve failed.

They can, in naked conversations in the blogosphere, have the luxury of talking in shades of grey rather than in stark black and white terms. They now can affort to be more open, responsible and transparent in their communications. 

But this is an uphill task for many suits as they lack the interpersonal communications skills to do this. I suspect a large chunk of the PR practitioner’s role in the future will be to help coach these executives, just as we do during media training, only that we have to get more savvy about the interperosnal communications aspects such as active listening, assertive speaking and self-disclosure instead of messaging.

The other big change that blogging will have on PR is the delivery mechanism. This is where I think Edelman ihas a leg up on the other PR firms, many of whom have not even woken up to the fact that blogging will change our industry. Its deal with Technorati will give it some very powerful tools but how it actually ends up using them remains to be seen. My personal experience is that while large outfits like Edelman have the resources the problem lies in the caliber of the people on the ground. Liek most persuasive tools and techniques, it can be used or abused. Ensuring a uniformly high quality of people who can counsel rather than resport to spin is a constant challenge.

Blogs will also potentially change the landscape of issues management, even in markets such as Indonesia with a relatively small penetration of internet usage. This is because the influencers such as NGOs and activists, are all plugged in on the Net and man of them have started blogging.

In the end, blogs change some things but the fundamentals remain the same.  One of those fundamentals, unfortunately, is the difficulty of convincing successful businessmen and professionals that they need to make anything complex sound simple; anything simple sound important — and credible because they have made the right decisions and taken the right actions.

That is a  skill that Blogs will not replace and no technology can make easier. So are PR people trying to take over the conversation? Well, if they are really good they would not have to: their clients will be speaking up for themselves, with greater skill, courtesy of their trusted advisors.