There is talk out there about whether or not corporate communications offices should respond to bloggers as if they were journalists. Here's my take on the matter:
Same mule, different saddle.
It isn't a question as to whether people asking for information to post on an Internet-based personal journal are journalists. They're not.
Journalism is journalism. Blogging is anarchy with formatting.
Blogging is just the next multichannel for what the information age has been up to since it became possible to forward a saved voice mail with commentary to everyone in your company.
Technology and hyper-connected habits mean there’s really no such thing as “segmented” or “targeted” corporate communications any more. An email from a CEO to an irate customer ten years ago can show up in a Wall Street Journal article tomorrow about something completely unrelated. A white paper produced for an industry conference in Ohio can prompt a misrepresentation lawsuit by activists in Indonesia.
Inquiries from “bloggers” should simply go through the same communications vetting process used to assess, direct and manage questions from news media, Wall Street analysts, customers, shareholders, industry researchers, activists, students working on term papers, some guy working on the president’s next policy speech, charities, con artists and fact-checkers from Who’s Who on the Planet Earth.
Doing business in the interconnected information glut means accepting that medium and message have morphed to create a single organic idea that constantly changes shape and context – like, uh, a press release thrown into a rushing river as it heads toward the ocean.
Companies shouldn’t interpret the validity or urgency of an incoming question based solely on its initial form or source. In all cases, focus on who’s doing the asking and why, the audience they represent, how the response will be used and in what context, who will notice and in what context, who should do the answering and in what form.
