Battling into the blogosphere

In the midst of the current economic crisis, both the Labour and Tory parties are turning their crisis management techniques to their own reputations first. It was reported in PR Week that they are applying tactics to the blogosphere – that risky ground where anyone can rise up as an influential voice, damaging the reputation of an organization. However, if harnessed well it can be another powerful tool in the armory of public relations strategies. The Conservative party is using a local blogger charm offensive at its annual conference this week for example, having identified the key influencers.

This increasing reliance on social media provides a challenge for those involved in media content analysis and we have a range of solutions which we can discuss with our clients. The blogosphere is a vast arena to get to grips with, making evaluation all the more important for assessing the impact your public relations programs are having. This challenge facing public relations firms was succinctly put by Ashely Friedlein at e-consultancy.com:

“Traditional PR was mostly about focusing lots of effort on a smaller number of key influencers, for example journalists at a national or trade press, whereas online PR is now more about the intelligent and efficient distribution of content, management of conversations, monitoring of hundreds if not thousands of media outlets, and measurement. A good online PR would be like a spider at the centre of a web sensing and reacting to the slightest reverberations across its network and moving fast to capitalise on opportunities as they arose.”

Evaluating the blogosphere

This is currently the hottest of topics for many communication professionals.

In recent weeks we have visited several clients to discuss the impact that the blogosphere may be having on reputation and how we can effectively assist them to monitor and evaluate this for them. While there is no formulaic response for each client we have identified some key questions that need to be answered before we can deliver a solution.

Among these would be:

1. Which online media key journalists use to source information/stories?

2. Which sites people who don’t read newspapers use to find their news information?

3. How much information can organisations reasonably be expected to assimilate? (The enormity and speed of the online world makes it unlikely that all coverage is required)

The response to each of these, and numerous other, questions, will assist in forming a basis for further discussions on how projects can be shaped. Together we are then in a position to work towards a model that allows companies to effectively develop their online reputation management.