It’s mailbag time at the FlackCave.
An email from a Flackster reader earlier today asked:
“What role should my PR department play in supervising corporate blog content?”
Easy: NONE.
Unless you’re actually going to be blogging yourself – or maybe helping promote other employees’ blogs by talking them up to your friends, family, customers, partners, analysts, reporters and so forth – you have no role.
A blog that is PR-sanitized, scrubbed for messages, spun, or otherwise adulterated by over-protective flackery can’t really be called a blog. We need to get it a new name. Maybe it should be called a “press release” – sure bears the same high stink of decay about it.
October 26, 2004
Posted by Michael O'Connor Clarke
Mike Golby, in a comment on my first post, below, has raised a bunch of interesting thoughts. Go read his comment, here.
Those are some Big Hairy-Arsed Questions. Important ones, too. In fact – I think they're too big and important to try to address in the dinky little comment box, so I’m lifting the discussion up to here.
Mike’s questions are precisely the kind of BHAQs I'm hoping to tackle through my cogitations, rants and ramblings here at Flackster. There’s plenty of meat in these questions for me to work on in a whole series of posts (thanks Mike -- the cheque’s in the post).
Let’s start with one of the easier ones – and the one that seems to flow most naturally into the thought-threads I’ve been weaving of late. Among many other things, Mike (with his tongue only half-way into his cheek) asks:
“Do we not all, to a degree, engage in the ignoble arts of PR, journalism, and link whoring.”
...continue reading.
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October 25, 2004
Posted by Michael O'Connor Clarke
2004 has been a big year in the blogosphere.
From credentialed bloggers getting the red carpet treatment at the Democratic National Convention back in July, to the spectacle of the massed bloggers flexing their collected muscle to bring about "Rathergate" – we’re clearly at (or already past?) something of a tipping point in terms of the mainstream media's awareness and acknowledgement of the influence of blogs.
This is pretty heady stuff for people so recently dismissed by former CBS News exec Jonathan Klein as a bunch of guys sitting around in their living rooms in pajamas.
Blogs are gaining increasing credibility as legitimate sources of news and opinion, at the same time as scandals such as Rathergate and the Jayson Blair affair have reanimated the perennial debate about the integrity and methods of "old school" news media.
The unabashedly partisan editorial stance of certain major news outlets is no longer accepted at face value – with the rise of the blogger, we now know who watches the watchmen. It's you and me – the citizen journalists. We can, and will, fact check your ass.
...continue reading.
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Michael O'Connor Clarke is proud to be a card-carrying flack. Currently based in Toronto, Michael has spent almost 20 years in corporate communications and marketing roles. He started blogging at almost the same time as he first moved into PR - over five years ago. Now he's trying to figure out how to combine these two areas of expertise for the benefit of clue-seeking clients. In his time, Michael has pitched people, products, processes and pop-tarts, but he has a congenital inability to peddle fluff.
