Politics Goes Blogging
By Angelo Fernando
One new technology is changing the face of internal and external
organizational communication—the blog. Blogs (or
web logs) are evolving at a tremendous pace and are not simply the
stuff of boring journals and ideological rants. If you feel as if
you’ve been caught napping while blogging has taken off, fear
not.
Blogs provide a way for organizations to bypass the media, get
quick feedback and to take on issues they would otherwise ignore
or miss entirely. For an individual, a blog can be a way to set
one’s own agenda and be heard. But it’s the political
blog that’s fueling the trend so far—an intelligent
PR tactic.
Politics Goes Blogging
Australian Prime Minister John Howard does it. British Labor Minister
of Parliament, Tom Watson has been doing it for years. Brand-name
journalists are doing it, as are writers, marketing gurus and HR
people. Welcome to the world of the blog, the newest flavor on the
Internet for many PR and corporate communication types.
Their value may seem small for now, because blogs are still flying
under the radar. But their impact may be far reaching. “People
who read blogs are thought leaders in their communities,”
says John Cass, who maintains a blog
dedicated to marketing communication. Blogging is a form of “community
building on a very lean budget,” he says, and highly recommends
it to PR and communication practitioners. Another PR blogger, Tom
Murphy, discusses topics such as the PR challenge that Coca-Cola
faced when it had to pull its Dasani bottled water off the shelves
in the U.K. An advertising blogger, Steve
Hall, says that he is reporting “on the brilliance and
idiocy of the media and advertising industry.” One PR type
in a listserve says that she is prepared to add “blog relations”
to her repertoire.
If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, it’s
because blogs fall into the category of publishing, giving someone
the capacity to reach any audience while bypassing the media. For
politicians, blogs are a powerful method to deliver messages to
their constituents. No press conference required. For individuals,
it means being heard because blogs tend to get high rankings on
search engines.
Imagine for a moment that you’re the corporate communication
officer of a company in 1995, and at a meeting one day, you call
people’s attention to something called the World Wide Web.
Eyes glaze over. The numbers guy who has heard the phrase on CNN
asks you to give him a cost-benefit assessment. The CEO says it
is “very interesting.” A few account managers snicker
in a corner about the wisdom of putting the company on a worldwide
stage when it can only market its products locally. Would anyone
care, they ask, if the company added this “HTTP whatever”
to a business card?
To many communicators this scenario is familiar. We all battled
with this “to web or not to web” question at some time.
Now replace the reference to the web with the word “blog,”
and the arguments (and the reactions across the room) are oddly
similar.
Is blogging a passing fad, or is it bigger than most people realize?
Be cautious about dismissing it. Charles Pizzo, a frequent speaker
at IABC conferences and a roving guru of PR and crisis communication
says that he actually remembers a time “when IABCers doubted
the value of e-mail.” Someone at an IABC chapter meeting asked
him “for a mathematical formula to justify the purchase of
a modem.” Suddenly blogs are everywhere. Blog software is
free, and maintaining a blog is extremely easy. In other words,
the investment—or the experiment—is virtually risk-free.
Like text messaging (known as SMS in many parts of the world),
streaming video, HTML newsletters, web conferencing and the other
varieties of peer-to-peer communication, we can be certain that
blogging will be usurped by something else once it has used up its
fifteen minutes of fame. But like e-mail, it may have lasting impact
considering those that are actively blogging.
Pundit Bloggers
Since it is election season in many countries, politics have been
the rocket fuel behind blogs’ ascent. Notorious bloggers include
the pundit variety of political observers. Check out Instapundit.com,
medpundit.blogspot.com
and www.Lawpundit.com
for a preview. Even mainstream newspapers such as the New York
Times (election updates called "Times On The Trail"),
The Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal) and The Guardian
in London have their own blogspace. Journalists are serious bloggers—officially
and privately. Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the New Republic
runs a blog that gets between 200,000 to 400,000 unique visitors
a month. Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News is publishing
several chapters of an upcoming book on journalism on his blog.
A law professor at the University of Tennessee, Glenn Reynolds,
perhaps runs the most visited blog called Instapudit.com. U.C. Berkeley’s
Graduate School of Journalism teaches it in class. Writer Seth
Godin, of permission marketing fame, actively blogs as does
Lawrence Lessig,
a Stanford University law professor. Does this sound like a fad
to you?
In the U.S., Democratic presidential candidates and political observers
used blogs as a way of mobilizing support. Howard Dean lead the
pack with his Blog
For America, a site that engendered his grassroots campaign
and was best known for its fundraising capacity. Hundreds of cities,
such as santacruzforamerica and tampaforamerica, joined in. So it’s
no surprise that blogs are the very stuff of campaigning. Both John
Kerry and George
Bush have blogs.
Flexibility of Language
Not all politicians work off of the same template. Tom Watson,
a British Labour Party MP (for West Bromwich East) maintains his
own blog. In fact, Watson has been blogging since 2001, long before
most of the world had even heard of this form of “journal
keeping” in cyberspace. In a country where over 175 Labour
Party MP’s have their own web sites, Watson, the sole blogger
in this group, stands out. He uses it to stimulate discussion on
anything from a bill to provide free lunches to school kids to Iraq
to the privacy issues of RFID tags appearing in Marks and Spencer
merchandise. His blogs are often picked up by the media.
With all this blogging, shouldn’t governments be doing it
as well? They probably will. Here’s one provocative reason
why: A British blog called “Downing
Street Says” is a place where the leaders get to rub shoulders
with the man on the street. You can think of it as a proxy government
blog. The "Downing Street Says" blog—unauthorised,
of course—wants to take people beyond the sound-bite culture
by publishing their readers’ views immediately below the transcript
of the government lobby briefing.
Sooner or later, many governments might have to resort to some form
of blogging in the same way that nearly every major government in
the world has been driven to set up a web site—if only to
be seen as more accessible. But how might a government blog? What
would be its tone? Consider a pioneer in this field, Australian
Prime Minister John Howard. Howard spices up the site with language
such as “dude” and “hell freezes over,”
vocabulary that would typically be thought as unbecoming of a head
of state. But it is entirely appropriate. Here is a section from
his FAQs about his editorial prerogative.
“Why did you delete my question? What kind of an insensitive,
bastard of a PM are you?
That's not a very nice thing to say. I'm sorry if I didn't answer
your question, but it was probably 'cause a) I'd already answered
one that was heaps similar, b) I'd posted something in my log
that was heaps similar, c) It was a stupid question or d) You're
Tony Blair. Nick off, Tony, and get your own web log. Plus, if
you didn't already know, I run a country as well as this web log,
so sometimes I'm really busy at that. Like, sometimes I have to
go jogging or do other PM stuff.”
That’s right, politicians have other things to do—like
running the country and campaigning for survival—but some
of these “things” might soon include opening a dialogue
on the web and speaking in an unpretentious voice. Blogs, by definition,
are not “lawyered” texts; they shun PR words and are
the very antithesis of spin. As the Cluetrain Manifesto (a book
that anticipated blogging without calling it a name) reminded us
over and over again, “markets are conversations” motivated
by passion, not press releases. In the post-Cluetrain world, communicators
who want to sidestep the sound-bite culture might want to watch
blogspace for the next big thing.
Angelo Fernando is a Sri Lankan-born freelance writer and member
of IABC/Phoenix. He is currently the MarCom director at Imperial
Capital Franchise Finance. His communication blog is at http://hoipolloi.typepad.com,
and his web site is at www.angelofernando.com/.
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