PRBlogger Stephen Davies reviews the impact this strand of social media is having on PR, individuals and companies

Blogging gone mainstream
Question: How many of you reading this article have also read a blog this month? Quite a lot of you actually, according to research company, comScore. In a recent announcement the company claimed that 14.5 million of the UK internet population visited at least one blog in August 2007 alone. In other words, 41 per cent of the total UK internet audience probably read at least one blog in a single month. Furthermore, recent findings from JupiterResearch - another research company - found that 50 percent of blog readers say they find blogs useful when making decisions on purchases.

The results are interesting and only add to the fact that blogging, once dismissed by some journalists as a passing fad, is not going away anytime soon. In fact, as individuals and organisations from all walks of life use them as an essential part of their communication initiatives it seems perfectly acceptable to suggest that blogging is now part of the mainstream.

The PR industry in its minority has successfully colonised its own chunk of the blogosphere. You only have to look at the high proportion of quality PR blogs here in the UK, and elsewhere around the world, to see that PR professionals are natural communicators with a knack for creating a good narrative. Smart PR teams frequently monitor blogs to stay on top of emerging trends and ensure they know what is being said about their clients.

A recent example illustrating the power of corporate blogging, albeit under terrible circumstances, was nowhere more evident than ‘Marriott on the Move’, a blog by Marriott Hotels’ CEO, Bill Marriott. Following the deadly terrorist attack at the company’s 480 room hotel in Islamabad, India, in September 2008, Mr Marriott posted a blog response titled, ‘The Senseless Tragedy’ detailing the events of the attack while showing compassion to the families of the employees who had died.

Having published the blog since 2006, Mr Marriott had ensured its readership and reputation were already well established. And because of these two factors, it gave him a direct route to the company’s customers and employees, while allowing him to take the leadership role so often needed in times of crisis.

The rapid rise of Social Media
Given the fast moving nature of the online world things don’t generally stay the same for too long. And despite being the one-time darling for us online PR types, even blogging has had to take a back seat over the last few years as we try to keep up with the invasion of new online channels of communication.

Take Facebook, for example. According to internet research company, Hitwise, the social network grew a staggering 2,905 percent from Sept 2006 to the same period in 2007. Initially beginning as a social network for Harvard College students, Facebook has gatecrashed the mainstream in the last two years in a journey that has been nothing short of phenomenal. With 120 million members, if Facebook was a country it would be the 11th largest in the world in terms of population.

As we’ve seen in the UK, Facebook is being used as a platform for the public to lobby against companies and the establishment. Remember the Facebook group ‘Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip Off’? In a nutshell, the world’s local bank (as HSBC calls itself) changed a policy on their graduate overdraft accounts, meaning graduates would be charged if they became overdrawn. Subsequently, two senior members of the National Union of Students set up the Facebook group in protest of the policy, and within a matter of weeks it had grown to 6000 members. Negative media coverage ensued, and no prizes for guessing that HSBC made a complete U-turn on the policy.

“Like any service orientated business, we are not too big to listen to the needs of our customers”, said HSBC. Indeed, particularly when there is a 6,000 strong group of graduates digitally protesting from the comfort of their own bedrooms.

Likewise video sharing site, YouTube, shares Facebook’s extraordinary growth. Purchased by media powerhouse, Google, in 2006, YouTube’s bandwidth and hosting costs are reported to be $1 million (£600,000) every day due to the sheer number of videos uploaded and watched by people around the world. As a result, many companies are trying to leverage YouTube and its massive viewership in the search of the new Holy Grail of PR and marketing: Viral.

Implementing a creative idea that goes viral is easier said than done, however, and many companies try and fail. Worse still, some set up fake grassroots campaigns- a practice commonly known as Astroturfing - to give the impression that an initiative has started organically. The name Astroturfing implies that the grassroots behaviour is artificial, hence the reference to the well-known brand of artificial grass, AstroTurf.

The rise of Twitter in 140 characters or less
One social media that has been the talk of the online PR digerati in 2008 is the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. As the ‘micro-blogging’ term illustrates, Twitter is a service that allows users to send updates in 140 characters or less. In fact, if one was to describe Twitter in 140 characters or less it might go something like this: - “A public SMS for the web. You follow other people to receive their updates and they can follow you too. Makes no sense in the beginning.”

As the example tweet states - a message on Twitter is often referred to as a tweet - Twitter can take half a day of use to see its benefits because first impressions don’t uncover the extent of its usefulness. However, like all social media, the platform is only as good as its community. Twitter’s is vibrant.

Everyone from 90’s hip hop star, MC Hammer to English actor, Stephen Fry have set up Twitter profiles. Even the world’s most powerful man and president elect of the United States, Barack Obama used Twitter as a means to communicate with the American voters throughout his election campaign. Twitter users more relevant to PR include a decent proportion of UK broadsheet and freelance journalists and savvy PR professionals from some well-known agencies and in-house departments.

Intentional interaction and super-fast speeds
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, set about creating what we now know as the internet, he designed it to be “a collaborative space where people can interact”. However in the early days - or what is now more commonly known as the Web 1.0 era – the ability to create content online was restricted to people with the technical ability to design and build websites. These barriers to entry have since been lowered, and setting up a blog or uploading a video to YouTube takes a matter of minutes. Anyone, anywhere with a computer and internet connection can create and publish media content. And they are in their droves.

A forthcoming report by the UK government, entitled ‘Digital Britain’ aims to address how the UK can cement its position as the world leader in the knowledge and learning economy. The UK already leads the way as Europe’s most digitally advanced nation according to Ofcom, and one objective of the report is to discover the cost of bringing super-fast broadband to the UK within the next three to five years.

Already feeling the strain of the new ways in which people communicate and consume news, traditional media are in for another bumpy ride as people increasingly use the Web as their primary source of information. And because PR and journalism are so intrinsically linked, this will continue to throw up new challenges to the PR industry as we move through this evolution of media consumption.

Stephen Davies is Managing Director of Online PR agency, 3W PR and blogs at www.prblogger.com