Unspun

Note: The Jakarta Post published this posting under the headline “Blogs level field for corporations and governments” in its Opinion Page on 4 July, with some minor edits.

Corporate communicators, journalists and PR hacks take note: your Defense Minister has just started blogging. What are you going to do about it?

If conversations with professional communicators in Indonesia are anything to go by, the answer is probably nothing. The typical attitude, especially for those over 40, is that blogs are for angst-filled teenagers writing syrupy prose and bad poetry on the Net.

They couldn’t be more wrong. Blogs are very likely to change the way businesses and organizations communicate, especially when it comes to crisis and issues management. The rise of the blogging phenomenon as a potential force in society is well documented in publications such as Fortune, Tom Freidman’s The World is Flat and Naked Conversations, a book co-authored by Robert Scoble, best known as Microsoft’s appointed blogger, and Shel Israel.

Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono has apparently taken all this seriously and has started blogging from April. So far he’s made five postings: The first was personal and on the arrival of his grandson while the others were about the US Secretary of Defence, development planning and the debate on Pancasila.

His last posting, however, is particularly interesting from a issues management point of view and can be a precursor of how businesses, organizations and personalities may try to engage their detractors in the future.

Titled Military Businesses and the Reform Process, Juwono rebuts the points raised by a Human Rights Watch report of June 2006 called Too High a Price: The Human Rights Costs of the Indonesian Military’s Economic Activities.

So what does he achieve?

Potentially a lot. By even going into the Blogosphere, Juwono is sending a strong signal that he is willing to discuss his views on matters that he cares about, in this case defense issues. He is also sending a message that he is willing to have a conversation with these stakeholders, whether they are supporters or detractors, through his blog.

By doing this he is presenting himself as someone open. By blogging about his grandson he also presents the human side of Juwono the Defense Minister.

Through his blog he is able to engage critics like Human Rights Watch and reply to them, blow for blow if necessary. This is something that it very difficult for an attacked party to do in the traditional mainstream media.

This is because in traditional media, advantage goes to the party that strikes first. So a typical example would be an NGO calling a press conference to accuse, say, a mining company of pollution. It makes the headlines and front page if the accusations are sensational enough.

By the time the mining company calls a press conference of its own to rebut the allegation, the story is downgraded to an inside page because a defense is usually not as sexy as an accusation. By then the damage is done and there is little company can do to mitigate it.

In the blogosphere, however, companies and NGOs enjoy a level playing field. An NGO can make an accusation and the company can rebut it in almost real time and bring other stakeholders in the ensuing conversation. Since most Indonesian NGOs and activists are plugged into the Net anyway it makes it an even better medium to engage them.

There is also increasing evidence that many issues now begin in the blogosphere and, when it reaches a critical point, jumps over to the traditional media channels. The woes of bicycle lock company Kryptonite, IBM’s crisis involving a flawed chip and other businesses crises apparently had early warnings flashed on the blogosphere. So this is the proper place for businesses and organizations to intercept issues before they become crises.

But for all their potential, blogs are still a relatively new phenomenon and not a few people will be questioning whether Juwono can influence anyone at all.

Time will tell, but in the meantime here are some figures to help you gather an impression whether Juwono’s blog will amount to anything.

Nobody knows about the total number of blogs in the world although some experts place it at 100 million. Jowono’s blog is now ranked 122,749 by Technorati, a web service that searches and ranks blogs by order of influence.

Technorati also says that Juwono has 44 links to his blog from 26 other sites. Among those links are Komunitas Blogger Muslim, Global Voices Online and influential Indonesian blogblogger A. Fatih Syuhud who’s named Juwono the Blogger of the Week in Blogger Indonesia. Fatih has even more links on his blog, meaning more people will read about Juwono and his blog.

Considering that Juwono’s blog is less than three months old with only five postings (most influential bloggers post at least once a day) that not a bad start. Juwono is certainly creating buzz in the blogger community, many of whom would now like to see Human Rights Watch engage the minister on his criticism of their report.

If Human Rights Watch engages Juwono then a conversation between may happen, leading to, in the best circumstances, respect for each other’s views. If the former keeps mum then it would not look too good in the blogosphere as it would mean that they are either so backward they do not know that the Minister is creating waves in the Net; or that they are too cowardly to take him on point for point.

Either way the lesson is there for companies and organizations that are frequently on the receiving end of NGO criticisms: you can potentially level the playing field with a blog.