Love the Blogosphere

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By: John Cantwell

A basic, wonderful and sometimes frightening fact about the Web 2.0 world is that information, opinions, facts, half-facts, lies, rants and raves all travel lightning-fast. A single person who, in previous generations, did not have a platform or the necessary resources to gain exposure, can now legitimately impact public opinion about a topic or product.

Companies and PR teams are faced now with crucial choices: When creating and managing PR campaigns, is it best to embrace bloggers, battle them, or ignore them altogether?

Perhaps no example better highlights the PR choices companies face today than the legendary firestorm (excuse the pun) that followed Dell’s bungled response to reports of exploding laptops caused by faulty batteries. (Check out #8 on ZDNet’s list of the Top 10 IT Disasters of All Time for a brief history of the incident. Then consider that Dell’s misstep is on the same list as #1 – “Faulty Soviet early warning system nearly causes WWIII”. The point being: to some, the Dell situation was only slightly less dire than a potential THIRD WORLD WAR.)

Dell, to its credit, did not stand pat and accept the criticisms being (rightfully) heaped on them. Instead, the firm was able to recover and even thrive afterwards because it adopted a proactive PR campaign that engaged bloggers. Dell held themselves accountable for the batteries and issued a comprehensive recall. And in the end, Dell’s rebound was profiled by Business Week as a model for successful PR. Now imagine how differently things would have turned out if Dell reacted negatively towards the bloggers or, even worse, didn’t react at all.

Here at DigitalBlab, it is our core belief that companies and PR teams will only succeed in today’s marketplace by successfully engaging the blogosphere. This does not mean firms should capitulate to bloggers or hinge campaigns specifically around bloggers. It does mean, however, that firms should listen to bloggers and engage in active dialogue so they can place themselves in an active, not purely reactive, position.

This is an area we’ll be discussing a lot in the coming weeks and months on DigitalBlab. We’ll be providing case studies and best practices for engaging the blogosphere. And as bloggers ourselves, we’ll provide our fair share of rants and raves about Good PR and Bad PR.

PR is changing pretty fast these days. DigitalBlab is here to help.