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Phil's Blogservations
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Posted by philgomes 3:47 PM
The Google Buyout Of Pyra Labs -- Some PR Thoughts:
I'm a little late getting to this news item. I think it is incredibly significant, so I wanted some time to mentally unpack this industry development. The excellent Web search tool company Google has now added Blogger creator Pyra Labs to its incredible suite of Web offerings, which also includes an acquired Usenet capability through the Deja buyout. Google News can show you some the places where this story has broken. Slashdot has a good discussion going, and Dan Gillmor seems to have been the one to break the story in the first place. How is this going to affect how people do PR? Not a whit, unfortunately. And this is why the PR industry is fundamentally broken. When I was screaming that the Usenet was an incredible tool for PR and competitive intelligence, my supervisor at the time dismissed it as "Phil screwing around in his chat rooms again." This person's views were echoed throughout the company, despite consistent evidence of how Usenet monitoring yielded actionable information for the client. When I wrote one of the first industry articles about PR and blogging, it was dismissed within my then-company as self-promotional fluff that "made too much out of an online fad." So incensed was I that I asked ExpertPR to remove the company's name from the article and add that of my own, G2B Group, months later. Industry watchers like Kevin Werbach, Dan Gillmor, and many others seem to think blogging is important. These are people that the average PR pro would kill to get a client in front of. However, my contention is that blogging has shaken a good number of agencies who are stuck on the edcal-speakcal-medialist-and-press-release treadmill. The reaction is to dismiss the development as the Internet's equivalent of the 1970s CB radio craze. Media developments like blogging force the PR industry to re-think about how it does business and services clients. In my experience, this is like mentioning the word "bias" in a network newsroom -- everyone knows the need to address the issue, but no one wants to really give it a hard look. The fact is that PR firms are terribly relectant to consider blogs legitimate avenues for corporate communications. I guess it doesn't sound as good in client meetings or sales situations to talk about addressing the blogging community and leveraging its virality and influence when everyone's egos demand top-of-the-fold coverage in The Wall Street Journal. Don't get me wrong. The PR industry is definitely interested in blogging -- G2B Group's web site has recorded several hits from some of the very big agencies, particularly with regard to the Media Relations Report interview on blogging. PR pros like Tom Murphy do a very good job of following these trends, and are passionate enough to do so on their own time. Trylon Communications and the PRSA were thoughtful enough to write and run this article about pitching blogs. The discussion is burgeoning, certainly, but the voices are few. But where are the C-level PR leaders we heard so much from in the late '90s and why aren't they holding forth on this topic and loudly? I'm talking about the flacko di tutti flacki of the ilk that Fast Company gave such generous coverage to in this April 1998 story. The inevitable wave of agency acquisition had an unfortunate effect on PR industry thought leadership -- CEOs became VPs and were probably told to fly in formation by their new bosses. This is where blogs are helping: industry-leading thinking in PR has been democratized, again, thanks to the work of PR-focused blogs. Perhaps Google's acquisition of Pyra will get the PR industry to take blogging seriously as 1) a significant development in journalism, 2) an incredible means to gain insight into a journalist's work and/or the communities s/he serves, 3) an increasingly important message vector, and 4) an rich and fairly immediate feedback mechanism. It's staggering to think of the effect that 1.1M Blogger users, now closer to the panoptic eye of Google, will have on how news, messages, and sentiments are disseminated, searched, and archived.
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This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL.
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