Radio National interview on blogging and PR

I was interviewed for the media report when I was in Canberra for my presentation to the public affairs convention. Like many Radio National programs, the media report is provided as a podcast, which is available here. This is a 30 minute program consisting of 3 interviews. The first interview is about crisis management with Sam Elam of media Manoeuvres, I'm the second interviewee and the discussion ranges across the impact blogging might have on the pr industry. A transcript should be available here soon.

Update: Here's the transcript
If you’re a regular listener you’ll know that we’ve talked about blogging a lot this year. But for the most part we’ve focused on how it’s affecting journalism. Trevor Cook has a different perspective: he’s a blogger and a PR executive.

Trevor Cook: Well I think that it’s made it more interesting in lots of ways. To be fair, it hasn’t had a huge impact on my job at the moment, starting to emerge as something we do, and it’s made it very much easier in the way I access information, the way I monitor the media, the way I can stay in touch with what’s going on, and what people are talking about. So it’s made it easier that way, and it’s made it more interesting in a sense, that there’s a lot more range of information that’s easily available.

Richard Aedy: But I mean, people like Jay Rosen, have said ‘This will be the death of your industry’, because you can’t control bloggers, like journalists can be managed with media management.

Trevor Cook: Yes, well I don’t think it will be the death of the industry, in fact I think the industry might grow quite strongly. But the industry will definitely change. I mean it’s a crossroads for the industry because PR has been a bit of a response to the media gateway. If the media gateway is gone, then a lot of those techniques about spin and things like that, controlling the message, single spokesmen and all that sort of stuff will become much more problematic.

Richard Aedy: So this is PR but in a post-spin world? That’s what you’re saying?

Trevor Cook: Yes, well spin’s always sort of a dirty word for it, but PR in a world where it’s no new cycle, things are happening all the time, you don’t know who the new journalists are going to be, I mean anyone who wants to set up a blog, and it takes about two minutes, can set up a blog and start criticising you and using search engines and stuff. That criticism can become as valid as any other criticism.

Richard Aedy: That is happening, isn’t it. I mean people are copping flak from one or two or a dozen bloggers and all of a sudden that generates its own momentum.

Trevor Cook: Yes, that’s right. Recently Dell had a service problem, with their support service for a laptop bought by one of the world’s sort of prominent bloggers, a guy called Jeff Jarvis who has the BuzzMachine blog, and he started sort of very angrily criticising their service, or lack of it, through his blog. Other bloggers chimed in and said Yes, they’d had similar problems, and Dell should do something about it. And pretty soon the media started picking up on it, you know, they started reading and then sort of Dell had this sort of snowballing thing where they had to deal with it, they had to start talking to Jarvis about it, but they should have started talking a lot earlier. I mean it was a sort of you know slow play for a company that should have known better.

Richard Aedy: What would you have told them, Trevor, if they’d come to you?

Trevor Cook: Well I think the classic response in a blogging world is to sort of take the criticisms head-on and to say, Well, you know, these people have criticised our support in these areas. You might want to admit to some failings there, you would want to say how you were going to address those failings, but you would link to the bloggers who were criticising you, you would become part of what they call the conversation, and you would try not to deny it, which is what Dell has used, a classic sort of big company response is to say Well you know, until our arse is on fire we’re not going to bother doing anything. And I just don’t think that’s appropriate any more.

Richard Aedy: So you’re talking about the classic, what I call the ‘Peter Beattie response’ to things.

Trevor Cook: Yes, that’s right. Well that’s what I’m sort of advocating. But you have to do it much more frequently and before it gets out of control. So before the noise level’s ramped up, you’re monitoring the bloggers. If you see one blogger complaining about you, you might want to respond to that. You’d certainly want to respond to it if you start noticing bloggers chiming in and saying, ‘Yes, we’ve had problems too, same sort of problems.’ And you really have to intervene before it takes off.

Richard Aedy: Are you finding that clients are aware of the blogosphere?

Trevor Cook: No. I have blogs on my C.V and a couple of CEOs in the insurance industry recently asked me what a blog was. But I think people are starting to get interested, certainly in the IT sector where I do some work, people are aware of them. I don’t think people are aware of the potential of them yet, particularly in Australia. I think in the US it’s much more developed than it is here, but it’s changed a lot in the last six months; business has become a lot more interested, I’ve been asked to do a masterclass type seminar on blogs and wikis for the corporate sector later this year. So that’s based on research that people are saying What’s this all about?

Richard Aedy: Because it’s easy to think of public relations as all about managing the media. Media relations in fact. But in fact half of what you do, or a good portion of what you do, is telling your clients what their stakeholders think of them. So blogs would be great for that.

Trevor Cook: Yes, that’s right. The classic good thing that a PR person can do is to be the sort of voice of the stakeholder internally, the person who talks on behalf of the stakeholders as if it were representing stakeholders to management. Management of companies often become a bit tunnel vision, a bit group-think in their responses, and a good PR person can say Well look, I don’t think that’s right, and with blogging, the PR person now has a lot of support. He can now point to voices of criticism, and not just say Well I think, but say Well here’s the evidence. So it could actually help a lot of PR people in dealing with management about some of these issues.

Richard Aedy: So how’s it going to change the job, do you think, over the next five years?

Trevor Cook: It’s very hard to predict, because these things move so fast. Podcasting’s only 12 months old, and so it’s changing very rapidly. But I think it will change our jobs, and make our jobs I think in PR much more interesting, because we’re much more the interface between stakeholders and managers than we have (been) before, between stakeholders and companies, and we’ll have a much broader range of tools, and we’d be able to publish our stuff straightaway, we won’t have to spend our time managing the media gateway so there’ll be many more opportunities for us. And so I think it’ll be a more open, more fluid sort of a job. I think the news cycle is just about dead as a concept, because this stuff, you know, it doesn’t have to wait till the morning papers, and let’s see whether the TV news pick it up later on in the day, or whether talkbacks pick it up. Something can happen, and it can become a big issue within an hour or two if it’s a bad enough thing that a company’s done. So we won’t have news cycles, we’ll have to respond in real time. So it will be more demanding like that too.

Richard Aedy: Aren’t most people still going to continue to get their news from the paper and the evening television, and breakfast radio? Those things aren’t going away.

Trevor Cook: No, they’re not going away at all, and prophecies of the death of traditional media are ludicrous, but people are starting to integrate blogs and podcasts and that into their media mix, you know. I think that I’m still going to listen to the ABC or watch programs like that on big things. But also there’s lots of small things I’m interested in that I’m not going to get in the media so much. If I am interested in talking about the support that Dell or anyone else is giving them, blogs is a perfect place to talk about that, and if I want to find out about that, then that’s where I’ll go.

Richard Aedy: Because with the proliferation of blogs, which have been growing so fast, you know, I don’t, how many there are now. How many are there, Trevor?

Trevor Cook: Well there’s 14-million – it’s very hard to measure because it depends. But 14-million’s a good figure.

Richard Aedy: Let’s go with 14-million. The thing is if there’s even say 10% of those are about news, or 1-million call it, it’s easier, as somebody on the web, to trust what the BBC says or CNN or The New York Times or The Australian or whoever, a trusted news brand. Surely that has more value than in the past?

Trevor Cook: It does, but I think that trust will be put to the test. We saw that with Dan Rather and CBS last year, you wouldn’t have thought there was a more trusted source imaginable, but he was brought low by bad research, or too keen to get the story up. And I think with something like The Daily Telegraph’s performance last week, that maybe people will say, Well I’d like to see other views on this, I’d like to read what other people are saying about John Brogden’s past, or whatever, before they just accept what The Telegraph might say about it.

Richard Aedy: I bet they don’t lose a single reader.

Trevor Cook: I don’t know, I think you could be wrong about that. I think the pushback, I don’t think they’ll lose readers, but the pushback, and I think there has been a genuine sort of community revulsion about going too far; once he resigned it was Game Over as far as most of the public were concerned, I think.

Richard Aedy: Yes. Trevor Cook’s a Director of the PR firm Jackson Wells Morris.

Comments

[Bob M]

I heard the RN segment today whilst driving. I thought your comments were very interesting, particularly revealing that the high level corporate executives in Austrlaia haven't caught on to the potential impact of bloggin thus far. Still lagging behind the U.S. on that one...

[Chui Tey]

I heard part of it on the radio this morning. I liked how PR officer's new role is to the the public's representative who works inside the company, giving feedback to management about how the company is being perceived, and using blogs as data-points.