CitizenSpin

Blogs and the Internet: a tool to defend as well as attack

I posed the proposition previously that the internet is providing the tools for publics to become more connected, and as Grunig suggests, more prone to move to activism.
Grunig & Hunt (1) assert that there are three stages in the evolution of publics. In the first stage, the public doesn’t recognise the problem; the public then moves to the aware stage - recognising the problem. Finally the active stage is reached – the problem is recognised and the public decides to do something about it. According to Grunig the idea is to communicate with an aware public before it actively opposes an organisation and becomes an activist public.
Thanks to Adriana at the Big Blog Company who reminded me about the Intelliseek report – Consumer Generated Media. This white paper describes how consumers use the internet to educate each other about products, brands, services, personalities and issues. This can be via a variety of channels, referred to as Consumer Generated Media (CGM) - online word-of-mouth vehicles, including but not limited to: consumer-to-consumer email, postings on public Internet discussion boards and forums, consumer ratings web sites or forums, blogs (short for weblogs, or digital diaries), moblogs (sites where users post digital images/photos/movies), social networking web sites and individual web sites.
The report points to the growing influence of the Internet in motivating Grunig’s publics: “In essence, the Internet has exponentially supercharged the concept of word-of-mouth behaviour, giving it a power that marketers have only begun to understand”, it adds: “The internet is significantly amplifying the power of brand apostles and owners, affording them many more venues and ‘megaphones’ for sharing their views with others.”

So who’s listening to this CGM?
The report suggests:
Consumers - Because it informs purchase, loyalty
Reporters - As it accelerates research and fact-finding
Analysts - Because it offers scoop/insight company won’t volunteer
Competitors - Allows them to exploit actual users of competitors’ products as “intelligence gatherers”
Regulators - Because vocal consumers provide leading indicator into future problems
Activists - As it helps reinforce/solidify a key position

The white paper from Intelliseek focuses on the marketing potential of the information available online, but in the context of the work done by Grunig on two-way communication as a Corp Comms tool, it seems the Internet provides an ideal tool for engaging these publics in a dialogue before they move to that all important activist stage?

Matt

(1) Grunig, J.E. & Hunt, T. (1984) Managing Public Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.

Political activism encouraged online

I wrote yesterday about Dan Gillmors book 'We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People' ( and mentioned the issue of the Internet and blogs providing a forum for citizens to become active Gillmor quotes the example of iCan, the BBCs attempt a promoting political activism.
So I was interested to come across more examples of similar sites being launched on BBC News today. In 'I will if you will' Tom Steinberg writes about his new project PledgeBank where people can pledge to do something if others do the same. For example:
"I'll set up a residents association for my street, but only if four other people will come to my house to talk about it."
Its the latest in a number of projects from Steinberg which include: FaxyourMP - a site which encourages people to write to their member of parliament, NotApathetic - where people can say why they didnt vote, and DowningStreetSays - where you can read unofficial versions of Downing Street briefings.
All these are great examples of how people are being re-engaged with the political process (with a large and small 'p') by the internet. Online communities are providing a good illustration of Grunigs situational theory of how publics move from being latent publics into becoming aware and active publics. (1)
Matt

(1) Grunig, J.E. & Hunt, T. (1984) Managing Public Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.

We the Media - Dan Gillmor. Blogs challenge mainstream media.

Books, newspapers, radio and television traditional media evolved, and with it the vested interests of big business and its own agenda.
Now the Internet is changing all that - grassroots journalists, or 'citizen journalists' as they are dubbed, are eroding the monopoly held by 'Big Media' on news and information.
This shift in how news is made and consumed is explored in some detail in 'We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People' (US link, UK Link) by Dan Gillmor. He's an established technology journalist in the US both traditional and new media. In the book he explores how this shift in power is affecting consumers, business and journalists.
The main thrust is that blogging is changing the face of the media, and that journalists and big media need to embrace this development rather than fight it. The new technology enables newsmakers to connect directly with the audience in many ways.
Gillmor explores what it means when more and more information is available to citizens he quotes many examples. One he cites is the BBC iCan site where the BBC brings together local campaigners to effect change in their local area it also happens to generate news stories for BBC outlets.
Gillmor believes the Internet will mean that in future, journalism: "will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers changing the role of both."
Rather than fighting this shift, he suggests that big media should embrace it saying: "the readers know more than I do". He argues that input from citizens can strengthen established journalism and that readers can become co-authors.
Gillmor doesnt just stick with blogging he explores the power of the RSS feed, and how these new citizen journalists can get their content out there.
The book briefly considers the implications for big business, and corporate communications. If journalists cant get away with getting things wrong (think about the Dan Rather debacle), can corporations get away with being less than transparent? (Its something which could do with more exploration and has prompted some thought for my dissertation).
Gillmor is an out-and-out fan of blogging, and what it can do for journalism. There have been many claims made for the Internet, and how it will create fundamental shifts in the way that business operates. It seems that were only just beginning to see what it can do for the traditional media landscape. Gillmor gives us an insight into some of the possibilities here, and its an exciting future. Its well worth a read and raises interesting questions for all in Corporate Communications.

Matt

Google news ditches blogs over accuracy?

The Sunday Times ran an item about the growing behemoth that is Google this weekend Google: How big can it get?
What was interesting was a section in a side bar about Google News. It went on to say:

"One potential flaw is that the most recent stories are presented first, rather than the best or most authoritative versions. Google is working on an algorithm to rank the credibility of news organisations, to ensure that (for example) stories from Times Online rank ahead of bloggers and poorly funded newsletters."

So it seems Google too has been vexed by the trustworthiness of material online, and has come to the conclusion that the size of the media organisation equates to the credibility of what it writes. However, think back to the New York Times debacle this time last year, as covered here by CNN, and you may conclude that argument is be flawed.

Theres been much debate about the Google algorithm and how fair it is in prioritising content, the fact that its operation is mysterious seems to feed the speculation, and there have been studies on whether it introduces political bias.One of the conclusions is that there appears to be a trade-off between breadth of coverage and depth.
If you want you can view a live breakdown analysis of the sources used in the Google News front page.

It remains to be seen if Google News does rewrite the algorithm to rank for credibility, however if they do, were unlikely to know the workings behind it.

Matt

Does corporate blogging devalue blogs?

This morning (Sunday 12/6/05) BBC Radio 4s Broadcasting House programme ran an item about blogging and how business is getting involved:
"The world of weblogs, blogging to those in the know, used to be one where individuals reigned - but Chris Ledgard has been finding out how corporations have started to get in on the act, perhaps even the BBC."
It included the increasingly common tale of an employee sacked for blogging about work - in this case the salutory tale of Heather Armstrong of dooce.com - a web designer who was fired after writing about work.
The piece suggested that corporate blogging is 'not quite blogging', Award winning blogger Tom Coates, PlasticBag, suggested that the best people talking for companies are the people expert and familiar enough with their products to say something meaningful. He added that if a communications professional is hired to write about at company or product then the blogspere is going to be cynical.
The piece concluded that the clever thing for companies to do is to work with employees who want to write a blog. It quoted the case of Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm yogurt, who employs a blogger and lets employees blog:
"It's only when we become humble and recognise that were just people selling to people that blogging will become the mainstream, companies how try to employer this tool to talk about how cute and wonderful we are going to fail. Tell it straight; share the dirty laundry as well as the good stuff."

matt

Believe the blog? What builds trust? What do readers understand?

In a comment on the previous post Trust the bloggers? Who can you believe online? Ben Haslem asks whether systems like those in place on Ebay would be of use in building trust in corporate web sites. - see Corporate Engagement. David Tebbutt also adds his own thoughts: "Chains of trust help. If someone I trust says they value someone else, the trust is inherited." He talks of links, word of mouth and referrals from sites like Technorati.
The current academic research into how people interpret and infer meaning from websites, chat rooms, bulletin boards or blogs, seems to be pretty limited. There has been some research focusing on how health information is presented to the public (1). This small-scale study investigated public trust in online medical information. The researchers developed a three-stage model of trust and primarily investigated the first two stages.
They found that users initially screen a web site assessing design, layout, colour, use of pop-up adverts, too much text, search facilities and corporate look. Secondly, users evaluated sites in more depth content becoming an influencing factor in trust. Sites which were sponsored by pharmaceutical companies or selling products were rejected at this stage.
It would seem that the consumer comprehension of content on the Internet is more sophisticated than simply using rating systems like that on Ebay. As David Tebbutt goes on to say: "If you arrive somewhere that appears good, maybe by following a Technorati pointer, surely you'd look around, to see what else they've written, who trackbacks to them, what sort of comments are made. All this is monumentally informative."

(1) Sillence, E., Briggs, P., Fishwick, L. & Harris, P., (2004) Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites. A paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, April 24-29 2004, Vienna, Austria.

Trust the bloggers? Who can you believe online?

Dan Gilmor, in his book 'We the Media. Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People', asks whose information you can trust online? He concludes there is a lack of framework for establishing the veracity of information and the credibility of the author. He calls for: "A reliable reputation system world allow us to verity people and judge the veracity of the things they say based, in part, on what people we trust say about them."
There are already some systems in place for checking the reputation of individuals within online communities - look at the way eBay operates its ratings system. Would this be appropriate for sources of information online, or corporate web sites?
There is a common argument that the public are becoming increasingly media savvy - Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, used a lecture at the University of Central Lancashire to quote a variety of statistics which indicate that the public are getting progressively more cynical about the motives of public figures (1). However, others see little evidence for this claim, researchers in a report for the UK media regulator Ofcom warn: "Notwithstanding widespread speculation that the public has become increasingly 'media-savvy', it remains unclear how far rigorous evidence supports or qualifies this claim." (2)
So who can you trust online? Can readers distinguish between something written by a journalist, public relations practitioner, or a fellow consumer? If they can, do they lend different weight to the information?
Matt

(1) Rusbridger, A., (1999) Who can you trust? Aslib Proceedings, Vol 51 No 2, Feb 1999 pp37-45
(2) Livingstone, S., Van Couvering, E., & Thumim, N., (2004) Adult Media Literacy. A report compiled by the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics, for Ofcom

Will 'Citizen Journalists' win out over big business?

Dan Gilmor introduces the idea of 'Citizen Journalists' in his book - 'We the Media. Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People'. It introduces the concept that the Internet is democratising the producion of the media and he quotes examples of newspapers and web sites produced by the people who consume the media.
Dan Gilmour uses his book to explore the growing power of the 'citizen journalist' - However, he suggests that this poses both a risk and an opportunity for the corporate communications profession, and questions the validity of what can be found online:
"The growth of grassroots journalism has been accompanied by serious ethical issues, including veracity and outright deception. Are traditional values compatible with this new medium?"
In the UK though, a paper produced for the media regulator, Ofcom, goes on to pose the conundrum that the Internet is both democratic, and may yet prove undemocratic. The writers suggest that interactivity enables citizens to be senders as well as receivers of messages - thus undermining the power of the traditional gatekeeper of the media. (1)
So it seems the new wave of 'citizen journalism' may yet give way to dominant commercial players - who may win out in the end . This raises the concern that the Internet may prove undemocratic, and ultimately reduce the diversity of voices.
Matt

(1) Livingstone, S., Van Couvering, E., & Thumim, N., (2004) Adult Media Literacy. A report compiled by the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics, for Ofcom

Using Blogs to Build Direct Links to Public

Using Blogs to Build Direct Links to Public
Firms are turning to the format to bypass the media and get out their message 'unfiltered.'
From Los Angeles Times - 06/06/2005

When General Motors Corp. wanted to stop speculation this spring that it might eliminate its Pontiac and Buick brands, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz took his case directly to dealers and customers who were up in arms about the possibility.

He wrote about it on the company's weblog.

"The media coverage on the auto industry of late has done much to paint an ugly portrait of General Motors," began Lutz's entry on GM's FastLane Blog, which the company launched in January.

The March 30 entry went on to say that widely reported remarks he made to analysts the week before had been "taken out of context" and that the automaker would not shed the brands.

A growing number of companies are stepping softly into the blogosphere, following a path blazed by Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others in the technology field.

The Internet journal format, they find, lets businesses expand their reach, generate product buzz and encourage consumer loyalty -- while bypassing traditional media.

"When we feel that we need to get a direct response out there, we've certainly got this bully pulpit to some extent," said Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media. "It's a place where we can talk directly to people unfiltered."

It's hard to quantify how many companies, executives and employees are blogging, but there are probably more than 100 official corporate blogs, with hundreds more in the works, said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer for Intelliseek Inc., a company that analyzes and tracks blogs.

In addition to Lutz, other notable executives who pen public blogs include Richard Edelman, president and chief executive of the global PR firm Edelman, and Craig Newmark, founder of the online swap meet Craigslist.org.

Done well, corporate blogs can create good word of mouth among consumers who aren't reading business pages or thumbing through trade magazines.

The FastLane Blog gets between 150,000 and 200,000 unique visits a month, and Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz's blog gets 300,000 visits.

But bad blogging can easily backfire. Readers will pick up insincerity instantly.

"Don't go toward fake blogs. Don't launch character blogs. Use a blog for what it's for, transparency," said Steve Rubel, vice president of client services at CooperKatz & Co., a New York public relations firm.

Rubel follows blog news on his blog, Micro Persuasion, and runs his company's unit of the same name, advising clients on blogging and on podcasting, the suddenly fashionable creation of downloadable person-to-person broadcasts.

He and other PR professionals can rattle off blogs gone wrong -- usually "fake blogs" that stir up the ire of bloggers by hiding the fact that they are really ad campaigns, such as one that McDonald's posted in advance of a Super Bowl campaign about a Lincoln-shaped French fry.

Blogs that smack of press releases won't do the job, Rubel said. He tells clients to see what's out there about their company or industry, then decide whether they want to engage bloggers or even start their own blogs.

One executive praised for his no-holds-barred approach to blogging is Schwartz, who started Jonathan's Blog about a year ago. Sun also encourages its employees to blog, and about 2,000 do.

For Schwartz, a blog was the natural way to reach out to the software developer community that Sun seeks to attract, an audience that regularly turns to blogs for information anyway. Schwartz often uses the format to criticize analysts and rivals.

A post Schwartz wrote last August claiming Hewlett-Packard Co. had abandoned an HP operating system, for example, resulted in a cease-and-desist letter from the company -- which Schwartz promptly referenced and linked to on his blog.

"At the end of the day, the job of any good leader at any corporation is to communicate," Schwartz said. "The hallmark of companies that will find blogs useful is the company that cares about its perception ... and the integrity of its relationship with its customers."

Companies that decide to enter the blogosphere should set up some rules, Rubel said. Key is making sure bloggers don't reveal proprietary or financial information -- a lesson learned by former Google employee Mark Jen, who was famously fired after gabbing about life at the company on his personal blog, which was not sanctioned by Google.

Jen, now a software producer at Plaxo Inc., helped develop the information management company's blogging policy. He says that as long as companies are prepared to deal with the sometimes harsh comments left by visitors, corporate blogs are a great tool for raising company profiles.

At GM, Lutz receives dozens of comments on each of his entries, ranging from "I drive a Buick and have for years. I love the brand!" to "Yawn!! Buick. Uhhhhh, does anybody buy Buick anymore?"

Visitors also have alternately praised Lutz for his candor and accused him of letting his PR department write the blog.

Wiley said opening the GM blog to comments was a source of concern, but executives ultimately decided that comments were key to having a two-way conversation with customers. He said comments were edited only to remove profanity or personal attacks.

As for Lutz's entries, Wiley said that he and an outside PR firm gave Lutz suggestions for topics and did light editing, but the words and thoughts were Lutz's.

A main goal of the blog is to keep the 97-year-old automaker culturally relevant, Wiley said.

"GM isn't always considered to be on the forefront of cultural trends," he said. "By getting in at the forefront of a communication trend ... being a part of that kind of gives you a fresh image."

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
Date: 06/06/2005

Media: The bloggers have all the best news

Media: The bloggers have all the best news: In America, the first major study of web diaries reveals that they are shaping the political landscape like never before, but what of their British counterparts?

From Guardian - 06/06/2005
Owen Gibson

The former CBS anchor Dan Rather last year experienced at first hand the power of the blogosphere. After his controversial report on the clouds over George W Bush's military service, US bloggers from both sides of the political spectrum swarmed all over the story.

And after the White House released the relevant memos, which had purportedly been written by Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, it was the blogging community that was credited with leading the news agenda as it speculated on their provenance. Two weeks later, CBS announced that the man who supplied the documents had admitted lying about their authenticity and Rather was forced to publicly apologise.

The furore around "Rathergate" brought the blogging phenomenon to the fore during the presidential election as well, and gave rise to a slew of newspaper stories suggesting that a seismic shift was taking place in the American media landscape. Could blogs, they asked, become the fifth estate?

In an effort to test that hypothesis, researchers from the respected Pew Internet & American Life Project have conducted the first in-depth academic study of 40 of the biggest and most respected political blogs and the extent to which they influence and are influenced by other media.

"We tracked not just the political blogs but also what the US mass media was saying and what general internet chatrooms were saying," explains Michael Cornfield, the senior research consultant on the project, named Buzz, Blogs and Beyond.

Its results show that bloggers are generally following another agenda, whether that of a political party or another medium, but also highlights the extent to which they can now influ ence the mainstream media on certain topics. "Sometimes blogs lead and can be very influential and other times they're followers," he says. While it remains too early to tell how the medium will develop, he says, the report offers an intriguing glimpse of how bloggers are starting to shape the US news agenda.

Rathergate showed that when bloggers were able to access primary evidence in the same way as newspaper journalists, they could run with a story. "One of the reasons they were so influential was because they were able to put up what they called 'the smoking memo'," says Cornfield, referring to a version of a document reconstructed using Word, and suggesting it had been faked.

"In one sense it's classic investigative journalism but what's new is that the clues are out there in the open. It would be as if the Watergate tapes themselves were online and we could all listen to them and hyperlink to them. This is the change."

According to the study, there are now "A-list" bloggers in the US, such as Andrew Sullivan and Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis, who are capable of setting the news agenda because they are habitually referred to by journalists in the mass media who rely on them to break stories. "Journalists, activists and political decision-makers have learned to consult political blogs as a guide to what is going on in the rest of the internet," the report notes.

Accordingly, for a certain breed of US political animal, blogs now perform the same function as mass market portals do for the rest of us - sifting and disseminating the morass of material on the web and pointing to interesting stories and primary sources elsewhere.

However, Cornfield also thinks it is important not to overstate the impact of blogs on political life. Apart from the relatively few and far between "swarms" such as Rathergate, he believes that blogs have had a limited impact on the national conversation. "The influence and impact of blogging has been felt much more by journalists than by politicians," he says, pointing out that a group such as the Swift Boat Veterans had a far greater impact on the election than the blogosphere.

The report notes that a number of other potential scandals - such as the apparent bulge in President Bush's jacket during the first presidential debate - failed to ignite in the same way. "For a conversation to acquire the intense simultaneity of buzz, and for buzz to register with force in public affairs, requires a number of other factors to be present, few of which are likely to be at the disposal of a single blogger, or even a blogging collective, ready to activate at will," it concludes.

Also, Cornfield says, the power of a particular blogger can quickly "wax and wane" depending on how hot a particular news story is and how much information they are able to acquire from other sources. On their own, the power of bloggers remains "circumstantial and contingent", the report argues.

In the UK, there was a feeling that the general election would provide domestic blogs with a similar spark to Rathergate. There was no shortage of primary material, such as the attorney -general's advice on the war in Iraq, but there was little sense that the internet impinged on the mainstream media.

While Belle de Jour got the mainstream media speculating on her (or his) identity, and the likes of Scary Duck greatly amuse, there is a sense that the Americans take their blogging more seriously than we do. With the odd exception (Guido Fawkes' Order-Order.com and Mick Fealty's Slugger O'Toole blog on Northern Ireland for example), there is little heavyweight comment and it is rare to see a blog break a story or substantially move it on.

One of the most persuasive theories for this contrast is the far more rambunctious nature of the British national and regional press compared to the mostly regional, generally staid, US titles. So, the argument goes, American bloggers are fulfilling a need for a heated national conversation among competing viewpoints, whereas we can arouse much the same feelings of empathy or revulsion by reading Richard Littlejohn or Polly Toynbee.

For all that, Neil McIntosh, the assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited (responsible for introducing a series of blogs allied to this newspaper), says that a breakthrough Rathergate moment is inevitable sooner or later. "You'd be daft to say never. All that it takes is someone to see that a properly produced Private Eye-style blog would work brilliantly on the web. You'll get something like that in Britain." Cornfield also points to evidence of bloggers mobilising the "No" vote in the French referendum on the EU constitution as proof that it just takes the right kind of issue to spark interest.

Meanwhile, Cornfield notes a new threat to the burgeoning number of influential one-man-band political bloggers in the US - the growing tendency for mainstream media to cotton on to the possibilities. "If everyone blogs, what about that fictional soap-box blogger in Hyde Park? Who knows whether they'll be able to keep their mainsteam audience or they'll be pushed to the edge," he says. And given the pace of change online, it is entirely likely that a new technology will come along and supersede the blog, he adds. "Not many people are going to dive into a 300-page document, but they're more likely to dive into a two-page document. And once homemade video content takes off and is shared, they're perhaps even more likely to dive into that."

Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Date: 06/06/2005