Mike Manuel pinged me about their new hire over at Voce Communications: Josh Hallett. If you’re familiar with Josh you realize what a great move this is for Voce.
This move got me thinking though. Smart PR and Marketing companies seem to be gobbling up respected communication experts who are also blogger. This trend has been going on for several years now, but are some companies like Voce and Edelman (which has over 30 active bloggers) on the verge of becoming media companies?
Where’s the line? At what point does their collective voice become a Marketing force unto itself? It used to be that PR agencies were hired by the amount of reporters in their Rolodex. Are we entering a time where an agency might be hired because of their stable of bloggers?
I’m not speaking about unethical influence by the company bloggers. All the bloggers I know would never use their personal blog to pimp their client. These bloggers do talk about their clients though. They do share their lessons learned with the rest of us in order that we can all learn together.
Does knowing that Mike works on the PlayStation account influence someone when they are deciding between a PS2 or an XBox? Does the fact that Steve Rubel (Edelman) works with Microsoft influence someone to give Vista a try (probably not since Steve is a Mac guy).
I think these are questions that will only be answered with time but I do think that agencies and bloggers need to be aware that these could become issues in the future.
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It’s a good point, Tac, I can’t say there’s no potential for abuse when a bunch of us have blogs like this, but whatever reach and influence we collectively wield would surely be destroyed if we started manipulating and abusing people’s trust.
The real interesting thing to think about here isn’t actually individual bloggers, but company blogs. When you’re a Google or a Microsoft or, uh, an HP, and you have multiple corporate blogs, the potential to use these platforms in an orchestrated way - to help drive awareness, pimp a message, etc. - is very powerful, very real. But unethical?
I agree that authenticity is important to staying credible with your audience and that manipulating that would ruin the trust that you have built up.
I think the best reason for a company, like HP, to blog is in order to build trust with its customers. I don’t think that corporate blogs could ever be as influential as individual blogs. People expect to hear the “company” perspective from an HP blog, therefore it’s just not as influential.
This post was right on target for me. A client recently hired me for an online marketing project. They had a list of links they wanted to have a presence on. It turns out the majority required content. Most of them were sites like Digg, so they didn’t just need content, they needed compelling content. So what began with a request for link building to attract traffic, turned into a content production workflow.