December 8th, 2008
Managing PR in an open source world
Friend-of-the-blog Joe Brockmeier has a piece up today about Amazon activating its community to act as sources on holiday stories.
It is a scaled-down version of what the Obama people are trying with Change.Gov. Make your fans your spokesmen, and they can overwhelm objections with numbers.
There are risks like lack of control. What if these people turn on you? But they also point to something important about how public relations must change in an open source world.
Through the first years of this blog the story collection process was actually proprietary. Many ideas came from PR pitches, backed by interviews with principals. Some still do.
But increasingly, to stay on top of the news cycle, and what the daily traffic reports say you want, I’ve been going out on my own, combining headlines with my own insights and never even touching the phone.
This can get PR undies into a twist. Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you respond to my e-mail? Why didn’t you wait for our official explanation?
What I am doing is casting my net wide, looking to the community (and the Google) for my enterprise work, and falling further-and-further behind on my contacts with “official” sources.
This can result in mistakes. It also brings me much closer to the bone of what people are talking about and thinking about. It’s read and respond, rather than call, interview and consider.
Blogging by its nature is fast twitch stuff, getting faster all the time. One of my colleagues has suggested PR mavens stop e-mailing him entirely and hit his Twitter page instead. He has more gray hair than I do.
So how then do you manage your client’s image? You’re either trying to insert yourself into this virtual stream or change its flow somehow.
What’s the right PR approach in an open source world?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 12/08/08
