Blogging's Financial Impact on PR

Not surprisingly, every time a new innovation comes out, it's immediately followed by a hail of predictions about both how the offering will both change the face of business and how that innovation will allow people to make scads of money.

Blogging is no different. First, the social activitism it affords most anybody with a 'Net connection and the time/inclination to do it, meant that mainstream journalism as we know it was on the way out. This smelled so much like dot-com era hype, I just had to laugh a bit, but at least on the surface, it potentially had some truth. The only real thing that was likely to stop it from happening is the fact that in a country where you can't even get 50 percent to vote, I don't think you'll have "average Joes" starting to blog en masse.

Nevertheless, a number of both well-known and not so-well known people within the PR industry have started blogging in the last couple of years, ostensibly to help further position themselves and their firms as thought-leaders in the industry. Like everything, I believe there are some good blogs and some that aren't exactly must-reads. However, I think anybody who wants to blog should contribute to the overall discussion of the industry.

The issue of just who is best qualified to represent the industry in the blogosphere became rather heated issue, after a guest columnist on former FT journalist Tom Foremoski's blog appeared to suggest that because blogging represents, as he put it, the "delicate olive branch of PR," it should only be handled by a few industry luminaries. Bite Communications' Andy Bernstein did happen to mention that his boss, Tim Dyson, would be one of them.

Not surprisingly, he encountered a hail of comments, and later redefined his views to be that some sort of quality-control system should be instituted, likening blogging to an open-source movement such as Linux where it's necessary to make sure that things function in a proper way. However, even after that redefinition, I'm still not sure I get it. How do an OS and PR compare? An OS has to function correctly or everything else that's dependent on it will not. Instead, PR is more of an "art" where things are continually refined, in part because it's a very subjective industry. In other words, you might have an idea, a client or a pitch that you think is just "the bomb," but it fails to float when you actually start to pitch. When that happens, you have to go back to the proverbial drawing board and come up with a new approach. Jokes about Microsoft functionality aside, you don't see software makers doing that very often.

In addition, Bernstein calls blogging a "killer app," again recalling visions of the year 2000. What's killer about it? Is it nice? Yes. Liberating? Yes. But does it make any money for anybody? Change who anyone votes for or buys from? Not likely. Bernstein seems to be among those in the camp that blogging stands to make a lot of money for PR firms, and that only a certain few are likely qualified to be thought leaders in that area. Again, this harkens back to 2000 when PR firms were putting out press releases about the next "value-added solution," and while that generated a large temporary increase in revenue, it also caused many shops to encounter very choppy waters over the next few years.

My suggestion: How about we just keep doing what we're best at? At the end of the day, when you put all this fancy jargon aside, we're called upon to advance the work of our clients in a way that best fits their business models and goals. Perhaps at some point that will mean blogging, but as long as you have millions reading and viewing traditional media outlets and a relatively small percentage of the overall 'Net audience blogging themselves or even reading blogs, I don't think it should be out biggest concern today.