Who is driving corporate social media in Australia: Part 1

I intend to do a series of posts on this subject to cover evangelists; conferences; media; corporate experiments; and, lastly, pr agencies.
Why Pr agencies last? Well, I think part of the echo problem (see echo chamber and echo beach) is that we narrowly define PR as something that is done in an agency or a communications department. But in the new era (please, lord, let it come soon) people right across an organisation will have much greater responsibility for communications, and the tools to do it.
Over at the newprwiki, another PR echo chamber event is taking place. A small bunch of agency guys have got together to talk about PR blogging. Steve Rubel had a go at trying to be guru to the world's global PR firms and pretty much pissed everyone else off. Originally, it was on a wiki but it was an invitation only event. Can you imagine? Do these guys get it? Well Steve had to back off that idea real quick. Hey, Steve people don't go for that stuff in the blogosphere.
Anyway, as you might expect the conversation has turned out to be pretty bland. All these PR corporate suits (no women seem to have been invited, or they declined) bemoaning the 'challenge' of teaching their worldwide armies of identikit consultants 'what makes a good blog'. Oh dear.
What we have to do is a) understand that social media is about publishing not marketing (or PR understood as perception management) b) understand that to be effective in the blogosphere we have to blend communication with content. Viz., if PR is to be effective online it has to go deep into content and not just get superficial.
In the blogosphere there won't be any 'solutions' - you'll have to get into what the problem is and how this or that thingy can help you fix that problem. The trick is not in all purpose nice-sounding words but in the detail and our capacity to engage. There won't be any 'enhancements' and so on. These blah words have become ubiquitous because marketing and PR people are lazy and they have been able to get away with stripping content out of communications and covering up their infamous behaviour with vague many-syllable words. Everything is a solution. I knew this idea had jumped the shark a few years ago when my local supermarket started selling 'meat solutions' (cuts in normal lingo).
You know why this sloppy crap is for the high-jump, because space is (virtually) unlimited now. People understand that you can only do a few pars in a newspaper, but online its all about the drill down. What does that mean? What is the source for that? So we communicators have to be able to go deep into the content. (I'd argue that good practitioners have always been into the content, but technology is on our side now - raise your glasses to silicon valley ladies and gentlemen)
Well, anyway, to talk about the challenges for PR agencies as being about the need to teach those consultants what is a good blog is to miss the fundamental point. The challenge is that they can no longer pitch a widget without knowing just about everything there is to know about it. They gotta be ready to explain, explicate, answer questions. Forget about teaching them what a good blog is, get them to learn the content and to be able to talk about it in robust words that mean stuff to real people.
This to me gets to why PR blogs tend to be a bit disappointing, yeah, boring. Where's the substance. When you read blogs by experts in areas like science and economics for instance you get a different feel altogether.
That's because the good blog is a blog written by an expert in something other than how to write a good blog (if I read another penetrating piece on 'whether blogrolls are still relevant' or 'how tags can build your traffic' I'll scream).
Many of the 'expert' blogs I read break all the rules about what is a 'good blog'. It works because they have something to say and they just goddamn say it.
Next installment will look at the evangelists of corporate social media in Australia.