As far as PR professionals go, Michelle Mikoljak is pretty tech-savvy. She lives and breathes e-mail; she carries her cellphone everywhere; and she's even shilling for
a tech client, Cellboost, whose offerings include an emergency power pack for when you forget to juice your cellphone or BlackBerry. But when asked what she knows about
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, she replies: "Nothing. What's that?"
Mikoljak is no Luddite. It's the PR profession as a whole that has a problem keeping up with new technologies, and even top practitioners still are behind the power curve. In
the words of independent PR consultant and industry veteran Peter Himler: "The PR community needs to wake up to the new channels and the new ways in which stories flow."
Foremost among these are blogs that, in a relatively short period, have become powerful news sources and are having a serious impact on the practice of journalism (see PR
News, July 20; April 20). But there is fallout for the PR profession as well and, so far, blogs have not been adequately addressed.
One way to approach them is to view the blogger as the offense and the internal PR manager as the defense. PR tech guru Steve Rubel describes a typical PR nightmare scenario.
"Let's say I catch a major corporate CEO in a compromising position," says Rubel, a VP of client services at CooperKatz & Company (New York City). "I photograph
that on my camera and upload it to my blog. Suddenly, that photo becomes 'discoverable,' and word can spread very fast."
However, as quickly as blogs have become a force, a new, defensive technology has arisen to address what can be a serious threat to corporate messaging. It's called the RSS -
- known alternately as "RDF Site Summary." Simply put, RSS allows a Webmaster to deliver fresh content quickly and easily while simultaneously allowing consumers to access that
news instantly via RSS readers and aggregators. The feeds make it possible to head off bloggers but, perhaps more important, the feeds help to shape any news story on the fly.
"RSS is going to have a major impact on PR. It is going to change completely the way we stay on top of news sources," Rubel adds.
Of course, some corporations have gone on the offensive, launching official corporate blogs along with authorized blogs under the auspices of various managers. Microsoft-
watch.com, for example, says there are more than 600 current Microsoft employees blogging on corporate issues. And as new tools emerge, these same corporations and their PR
guides look to bring these technologies in-house.
As director of new media at General Motors (Detroit), Michael Wiley has built up an impressive arsenal of technological weaponry designed to enhance the automotive
giant's communications. It starts with FastLane (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com), which delivers auto-industry news written by GM's Vice Chairman Bob Lutz and other senior
executives; the blog generates about 150,000 unique visitors a month and, at the end of July, it topped 1 million visitors for the year.
But it gets better. This summer, GM added a new component, FastLand Radio, a podcast offering talk-radio-style programming. "It is taking people behind the scenes to get
information they would normally not have access to from a major company," Wiley says. A podcast is a form of content production that creates audio files, typically in MP3 format,
making them available online for easy downloading (see PR News, Feb. 23). So now Wiley has a blog that also offers visitors access to a downloadable radio show. To round
out the picture, all the elements are tied together with RSS. That's what Wiley does; he allows FastLand visitors to subscribe to a RSS feed that sends them alerts whenever new
podcasts are available.
That's correct: Blog readers get a RSS feed with podcast alerts. A year ago, that sentence could be considered gibberish. Now it's part and parcel of how PR will be practiced
in the (not-too-distant) future. "In the last six months, with mainstream adoption, blogs, RSS and podcasting all have started to get huge," Wiley says. In particular, "the stars
are starting to align for podcasting. Apple's latest version of iTunes actually incorporates podcasting into it," he adds. That means accessing podcasts is only going to
get easier.
If Wiley is bringing together these technologies in order to push the news out, others could just as easily grab hold of these tools to pull information in. Himler points to
RSS as a potentially monumental mechanism for saving time and effort. "If you are a PR practitioner and you want to follow your clients and your clients' industries, with RSS, the
information is pushed to you in a very easy way," he says.
While much of the focus these days has been on communications mechanisms -- blogs, pods and other nascent technologies -- one shouldn't overlook the ongoing development of
some excellent tools in the more general technological realms, many of which can be of great use to savvy PR professionals.
Take the products developed by such companies as WebSurveyor (http://www.websurveyor.com), Confirmit (http://www.confirmit.com) and The Survey Systems (http://www.surveysystem.com). All of them produce online-survey software. While telephone research and focus groups have their place
(but less so in the "Do Not Call" era), they also have a price in terms of time, labor and expense. By shifting all or some of the work into the Web environment, it becomes
possible to get the same results in less time for less money.
Beyond the proliferation of new technologies, however, is a fundamental change in the very nature of how PR functions. "The old model dictates that a company makes the news,
crafts the language, issues the support material and controls the message," Himler says. All of those facets of PR still are true, but the $64,000 question is how will PR pros ask
their various audiences to interact with new ways of receiving and absorbing information?
"If you want your client's news to have greater traction, you have to be aware of how to syndicate it," Himler adds. "Press releases have to be RSS-enabled; your Web site
needs to have broadcast-quality video; and you need to make it easier for a journalist to cover the news your client is making."
Easier said than done. But for corporate PR executives who are already pressed to justify their budgets and to explain in greater detail their operations, it can be a hard
sell to push for the adoption of a new round of technologies.
At GM, Wiley says it all depends on how you shape the pitch. Don't just ask for a slice, he says, ask for the whole pie, and tell them why it has to be that way. Among those
PR executives who succeed in updating their technology, Wiley stresses "they are the ones who are educating their senior leadership on the entire changing media landscape,
[whereas] before they were trying to just sell them on the blog idea."
Contacts: Peter Himler, 516.729.6461, [email protected]; Steve Rubel, 212.455.8085; Michael Wiley, 313.665.3183, [email protected]
Tech-In The Bull By The Horns
- Want to aggregate RSS feeds in order to give them a quick and easy read each morning? You'll need aggregator tools. BlogBridge (http://www.blogbridge.com) is an open-source program geared to new users of RSS aggregators. Bitty Browser (http://www.bitty.com) displays RSS feeds as well as podcasts within a virtual navigable Web-browser frame. Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird) is an open-source e-mail and newsgroup client that also can read RSS
feeds. - To find out who is podcasting, check any one of a number of podcast directors, including
- Still not spitting information out fast enough? Try Flickr.com, a site that allows for simplified storage and sharing of photos. Or aggregate relevant information through
http://del.icio.us - it's an easy bookmarks manager that allows end users to add favorite Web pages to a collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords and to share
the collection internally as well as externally - say, with journalists covering your space.