Not another effort to sell a weblog. Not at all. Just a statement.
During the Easter weekend the German blogosphere had another "incident". Somebody picked up an image from a blog without checking the rights and since a blog you might or might not call A-list (depending on whether you believe in A-lists or not) was involved, the picker-upper got called. Unfortunately, it was a PR-agency committing the "crime". Djure Meinen from pressrelations (they do – among other things – blog monitoring) wrote a great post on the issue (in German) and I want to highlight one paragraph, which relates to the issue; the issue being that this incident might be used as yet another example (by PR-agencies) to showcase the risks involved when companies put themselves out there in the blogosphere.
Djure says:
The first and central mistake is to portray the weblog phenomenon as risk. This is wrong for two reasons: First, chances are being overseen and secondly, risks are overrated. I dare say that crises in the blogosphere cannot be created artificially. All known cases stem from problems created by the people concerned. E.g. there was something wrong with Kryptonite’s locks. Not online, but offline. (He gives several additional German-specific cases).
I agree strongly with this and would like to add my own two cents.
Even if a company has no weblog it could still be prone to be called out in the blogosphere.
"Being called out" is a consequence of the opportunities the new publishing technologies have given individuals. Companies are now finding out what people were thinking already but had no way of communication. You might want to check out We the Media on this.
On the contrary, weblogs offer the potential of creating a relationship
with customers, shareholders, critics or whichever group of people it
might want/need a relationship with.
Technorati Tags: pr, weblogs, wethemedia