Mark Phillimore sent me a list of questions he prepared with his students from the London Metropolitan University and asked me whether I could answer them through a podcast, what we did together thursday evening, and also blog the list here to give a chance to his students to get other point of views...
I won't share the podcast here as unfortunately it was one of my worth (on the technical point of view, I also lost 3 minutes of it, it has been a real mess....) so I decided to moderate this blog...;o)
Regarding the list of questions, I copy paste them below, if you could give few minutes of your time to grab some of them and leave your thoughts in the comments or on your blog and trackback here to let us know, this will be great for Mark's students.
Questions:
1. What do you think of Google’s use of its corporate blog to announce the recent
court case settlement. This caused a great deal of fuss from the investing
community. Was this due to Google perhaps misunderstanding role of blogging
and failing to consider more formal communication routes for certain
announcements (such as online press office) or do you think it was deliberate to
highlight growing role of blogging ?
2. How important is new digital media technology for the PR industry?
3. Have you come across the Vocus system which was demonstrated to us. The
CEO said PR companies have been slow to invest in IT infrastructure, what do
you think?
4. How long did it take you to develop the “right” style for your blog?
5. Losing control in the social computing model seems a concern to business, what
is your view? How are you able to reassure company’s or organizations on this
issue?
6. Today we have been looking at company web sites and many have used very
traditional communication models. Which sites would you suggest highlight or
are starting to explore more advanced social computing models?
7. Do you think podcasting may become more influential than text blogs?
8. We noticed that many blogs actually have very few comments from readers.
Does this highlight the limits of blogging as an interactive medium or that
“information grazing” is a key participation process in blogging as opposed to
actual interaction?
9. Do you distinguish between forums/chat rooms and blogging? Do you know of
companies using forums in an active dialogue?
10. How much time do you spend blogging each day?
11. Tell us about some of the projects you are working on and the communication
issues this is tackling?
12. Which new media technology, do you consider, is one to watch and is going to
become influential and powerful over the next few years for the PR community ?
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5) Losing control in the social computing model seems a concern to business, what
is your view? How are you able to reassure company’s or organizations on this
issue?
Ha! This is an interesting one. Businesses that fear losing control should realize that they never had control in the first place, so in reality they're not losing much. There may have been an illusion of control, when the marcom tribe thought it could control the channels of comunication, but that's only the channels. What about what's realy going on in the consumers and sstakeholder's hearts and minds? it is time to adopt a two-way approach to communication and allow stakeholders to be co-owners of the brands. It worked pretty well for Apple, didn't it?
Posted by: Robert de Quelen | 28 March 2006 at 05:14 AM
Number 8
really interested to note the 'browsing' rather than posting by readers - some research I did recently shows students did the same when we used a wiki site to host a year one group - lots of reading, but only two messages. You can read the article for yourself here:
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/capd/in-house-journal-investigations/volume-2-number-1.cfm
Posted by: Debbie Holley | 27 March 2006 at 03:40 PM
On question 4 (time to get the right style for your blog), the factual answer would be 3 months in my case. My blog was private all that time.
The real answer is that you need to know right away what you want to discuss about whatever it is : PR, bananas, madonna or Pizza Hut. This cannot change. if you change this, you need to create another blog. Though, I consider it sane to make your blog evolves in its style. This is in fact the definition of a blog: a never-ending and always changing project. You change, the others change, the world changes: your blog should follow the same route.
But you do not have to think about it and plan it. One day, you look at your blog and you find that it looks dull.
Fine: time to change has arrived.
One last thing: if you do not like the style of your blog, don't expect others to do.
Be intuitive but be tough with yourself.
Posted by: philpox | 27 March 2006 at 02:27 PM
I know time is missing... but, you should make a post for each question and open the debate :-) There ar so many things to say for each point...
Posted by: jbp | 27 March 2006 at 01:23 PM