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Blogs Amplify Issues and the Media is Listening

There has been a lot of talk lately about Dell’s very delayed response to Jeff Jarvis’s complaints about quality and service on his blog as well as Google’s dogmatic reaction to CNET to cut them off from executives when a journalist Googled their CEO Eric Schmidt to reveal personal information found by their own search engine. (see David Kirkpatrick's coverage of Google in Fortune) Both topics were discussed in blogs actively as soon as the events happened but the stories gained tremendous traction once the traditional media picked them up. I’m including online news publications in this group as they are usually setting high journalistic standards for research and reporting. Marketing and PR people who don’t already get the importance of keeping a constant eye on digital discussions about their own companies need to understand the impact of citizen journalists and everyday bloggers to story development.

For some reason, many large companies with otherwise savvy marketing communications departments seem to have forgotten three key points about the media:

  1. the media plays a major role in communicating key corporate information and issues to consumers, employees and investors
  2. the media does research before they publish, seeking to find the balance in each story and
  3. the media often relies on coverage from other media professionals to understand the strength of a story and to enhance their knowledge of an issue that may be used to extend their own stories.

Professional journalists are trained to investigate issues and uncover problems. The blogosphere provides extensive data and unique perspectives that journalists can use to enrich their own research. Citizen journalists and professional communicators who happen to be bloggers may not investigate the validity of all blog posts to the extent that a journalist will but they often uncover and reveal sources through their connections. In turn, professional journalists research these sources and report on those that pass their journalistic standards, often crediting citizen journalists as individuals or enmasse for contributing to the development of the story. Dan Gillmor who is both a professional journalist and a long-time active blogger explains the relationship of blogging to journalism in his excellent book We the Media.

The symbiotic nature of the blogosphere is good for journalism and for consumers. It’s good for big business too. Most large, highly visible companies, including Dell and Google, do understand the power of their brands. I believe this is true of their product evangelists as well as their accountants. I'm sure they have carefully calculated the importance of satisfying customers to grow their businesses and retain customers. So I don’t buy the argument that they don’t care at all about quality or negative brand perception even if they’ve been slow to understand the power of the blogosphere. I do think they failed to include the blogosphere in their calculation of the key influences on brand perception and customer satisfaction. I hope other companies can learn from this.

Fortunately, there are companies like Microsoft and Sun that have been vocal cheerleaders for how incredibly valuable the blogosphere can be as a tool to build and improve customer relationships. I encourage all marketers to look seriously at how these companies constantly seek to listen to online discussions and engage with customers and detractors rather than shy away from issues. Listening does not eliminate issues, but it does give the company the opportunity to show their concern to the consumer and potentially keep them as a happy client. We all know that happy clients are the best salespeople.

Posted by Julie Woods on August 24, 2005 at 11:00 PM | Email this post Permalink

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