Can you help me help a grad student with her research on blogging and social media?

I received the following email:

Hello Mr. Thornley,

My name is Leah and I am a graduate student at xxx University in
yyy and I am writing a research paper about blogging. … My
research is exploring the use of blogging as a useful social facilitator
between the media(community) and organizations. …

I would love to know how you view the use of blogs in terms of importance in
the communication between businesses and corporations and the media. Has it
greatly helped? Some corporations have had some embarrassing mishaps with
the use of blogs (ex. wal-mart), how can this be prevented? Why should
corporations still consider the use of blogs despite their fears? If a
corporation is considering the development of a blog, what things should be
taken into consideration?

If you could provide some insight into any of these questions that would be
wonderful. …

Sincerely,
Leah H.

I saw this post as I was trying to catch up on the 113 unopened emails in my inbox. I didn’t have as much time to answer it as I would like. But I offered some brief comments:

Leah, you ask some very good, but large questions. Proper answers would require a long post to respond to properly. I’m afraid that I have only a few minutes, so some brief points:

1. “…blogging as a useful social facilitator between the media(community) and organizations.” I would not put “media(community)” together. Media has been the traditional intermediary PR practitioners have used to convey messages from the source to interested audiences. Social media allows us to step outside of this paradigm and connect directly with those communities of interest. Traditional media relations will have an ongoing use for reaching mass audiences. But social media allow us to communicate directly with communities built around particular interests.
2. We are still in the early days of the introduction of social media into corporate communications. There have been examples of poorly conceived and badly executed programs. That is inevitable in any process of innovation and discovery. It should not discourage anyone from persevering, because…
3. The adoption of social media is proceeding at a fantastic pace. Last year it was blogging and podcasting. This year, it is Facebook and video blogs. Next year, it will be something else. But they are all adding incrementally to my ability to find and relate to people with whom I feel a bond. This is a primary urge of social animals. Corporations that ignore this will pay a high price. They will lose the opportunity to build a bond between themselves and communities that share an interest in them and their products. This will hand a tremendous competitive opportunity to nimble competitors who understand that we like to do business with companies, products and services with which we identify.
4. Corporations should not consider blogging. People who have a desire to say something and connect with people who care about similar things should blog. Many of these people will be inside corporations. The best corporate blogging strategy is to find these people and encourage and cooperate with them. Ultimately, this approach will allow outsiders to see the real human warmth and personality that resides in the people who work in that corporation.

Ok. That’s the advice I offered between doing the dishes after dinner and putting the kids to bed. I know it’s thin stuff and can be improved upon.

Can you please help Leah? Add your own answers to her questions as comments on this post or trackback to a post on your own blog.

UPDATE: Tris Hussey has offered some great insight and advice on the One by One Media blog.

Mark Ragan sent me another email regarding the removal of the Social Media Club group from MyRagan. (Background to this can be found here, here, here and here.)

I’m posting Mark’s email in full because I believe that the issue of control within commercial social media spaces is important (and because he agreed that I should do so).

Many people gloss over the fact that spaces like Facebook, MySpace or MyRagan are owned by a commercial operator. And that owner can establish the rules to serve his own purposes. The owner can change the rules and apply them as he sees fit. And the licence agreements of many (most?) of these sites transfer ownership of the content I generate to the owner of the site.

Search engines do not index the content on these closed, commercial spaces. So if the owner of the space removes my content, it is gone. Truly gone. (Chris Heuer discovered this the hard way when Mark Ragan deleted the Social Media Club Group and all its content from MyRagan.) On the other hand, if the author of a blog that exists in the open removes or edits that content, it persists in the Google cache and anyone interested in seeing what was there can find it.

Control to establish rules, change them, and apply them. Ownership of content. The ability to edit or remove that content. The ability to grant or withhold access.

That’s a lot of power.

It sounds a lot like the power that owners of traditional media have exercised. And the most respected of those traditional media proprietors are those who do not attempt to impose their own views on the content, but instead concerned themselves with producing the highest quality publication.

In my view, if the owner is “hands off” of the content, the space can thrive and serve its members well.

Here is what Mark has to say in the email he sent to me:

My mother loved that old saw, “Words are cheap.”

Well, I am tired of trading accusations with Chris, and I am nearly certain he feels the same way. So here is what I propose. it’s actually quite a perfect end to his debate.

Judge me by my deeds.

If my critics are correct in their assessment of me, I will:

–Rule MyRagan with an iron hand;

–Stamp out conversation that doesn’t advance the goals of my organization;

–Cram products down the mouths of my vulnerable members;

–Use the site to bludgeon my customers with advertising;

— And generally impede the free flow of information that is not beneficial to me and my company.

I think this is an accurate summation of what has been predicted of me.

Chris said that my reconstituting of the Social Media group came about because I felt threatened by his success at achieving 100 members. Well then, watch me. Several groups will soon approach those numbers. They too are headed by consultants, most of whom are barely known to me. We should be seeing heads roll any day now.

So judge my actions. Here is what I predict:

—That I will never attempt to squeeze economic advantage from MyRagan members through crass advertising, spam e-mails and conversation that always points toward Ragan products;

— That MyRagan members will hardly know I exist. They have already gotten along fabulously without me.

— That conversation will flow unimpeded by the dictates of my commercial enterprise, Ragan Communications.

— That the site will remain pristine with the line between editorial and advertising clearly marked.

— That Ragan will offer up not only a meeeting place for MySpace-type networking, but a place that communicators visit for the best content on the market.

Finally, I predict that Ragan will go on being what it has been for nearly 40 years–an advocate, news source and sometime entertainer for the corporate communications community, an organization that understands its customer better than nearly anyone else and always tries to do the right thing.

Print this out, tape it to the wall, measure me against it.

Then let’s meet back here in a year. OK?

If Mark runs MyRagan in this way, I think that it is unlikely that there will be repeats of the mistakes that were made in the removal of the Social Media Club group.

But there’s just one more thing. Mark suggests that we “meet back here in a year” to assess how he has performed against these measures. A year? Mark, you can expect that your performance against these standards will be monitored and measured daily. That’s the reality. Information sharing and learning now proceeds constantly and virtually instantly. <!–

Mark Ragan posted a reply in My Ragan to my follow up comment on his decision to remove the Social Media Club group from My Ragan. Mark writes:

There are many questions and good ideas in your reply. Let me think about all of this.

But I do have a real hesitation to allowing the commercial logos.

I set about attempting to make this site look highly personal and noncommercial. If we changed our mind on this, the site would be littered with logos of this or that agency. And I fear that the people part of this would be diminished, replaced by shingles. Right now, when you look at the site, what do you see? You see the faces of individuals. People. Human beings wanting to interact. I am trying to preserve that.

As for the flags representing the countries, I am assuming that most people will not interpret that as a commercial for the country, don’t you? There is a huge difference between, say, a logo reading Edelman Public Relations, and Brits Group.

Now imagine for a minute if I allowed Edelman PR to do what Chris did: Put up a sign advertising seminars and services. Can you imagine what would happen next? Every agency would stampede to put up their own logos and ads for their services. In fact, this has already happened. We had to begin taking down people who simply posted their URLs on our blog site.

Then there are the people who woud interpret the presence of company ads and logos where groups go as a economic model for Ragan. They would conclude that we sold off the groups to the highest bidder. Certainly you see this, don’t you?

Now, I mentioned your good ideas above. I would not object to a former Edelman employees group because it would be clearly stated that this is not an initiative by the marketing department.

Finally, you mentioned Facebook and MySpace. I am trying to avoid looking like those sites. They are plastered with ads selling things. You can’t avoid them.

Again, I am trying to maintain a fairly pristine environment here. In fact, the irony here is that I am attempting to make this community a shining example of what you preach: namely, a place where people aren’t sold anything, pitched anything. A place where human faces stare out at the user, not logos. I would think that you would have approved.

But maybe I am proposing something else here, perhaps I am saying this will be a more controlled editorial environment where standards will enforce a clean look and relevant conversation.

Afterall, Ragan has a 40-year history of maintaining editorial integrity. And our customers have always appreciated that. Why would we stop now? AS you have pointed out, this is Ragan’s space. Shouldn’t we be allowed to set the standards based on OUR vision of editorial excellence? Maybe those standards will be different than MySpace or Facebook, but we’re not charging anything. People can leave if they disagree.

As for Chris, he is welcome to return to the group, even as moderator. Remember, everyone in this debate forgets that I wrote him a letter urging him to do so. All I ask is that he not advertise his services in a permanent logo and message on the group page.

“Let me think about all this,” says Mark. Good. Even better, he explains his own thinking and indicates that Chris would be “welcome to return to the group, even as moderator. … All I ask is that he not advertise his services in a permanent logo and message on the group page.”

Seems reasonable to me and I hope that Chris and Mark will work things out.

I also hope that Mark will think long and hard about this episode. Yes, My Ragan is MARK’s space. He can do what he wants with it. But if he wants My Ragan to be a credible social media site, he should forebear from using his control. Social media is driven by a desire to share and a spirit of generosity. If My Ragan is shown to be primarily a way for Mark Ragan to acquire more “customers”, people will realize that the bargain is unbalanced and they will flee to the first alternative that comes along.

Hmmm. Is this an opening for the IABC and PRSA to play the role that their members would probably have expected them to play in the first place? Either or both groups could do what Ragan has done, but do it for the benefit of their entire membership. Seems like a good idea to me. What do you think?