Interesting piece on online Guardian yesterday - Why weblogs could be bad for business. Been grappling with the very same issues the author raises myself and have come to the conclusion that I'm not sure I really want to go there. Maybe it's because I don't normally work on consumer-related PR projects, that I feel a certain disdain about "creating" something seemingly "spontaneous" only to monitor and control it to be the corporate mouthpiece it is most certainly is designed to be.
I guess if there were chaos theory (and there may very well be for all I know) in public relations, then real time, unrestricted weblogs would be the very tool to test it to the limit on. From my experience however, there are very few major corporates that would be willing to sponsor such an experiment.
Ah, so I see that someone else has coined the term spinblogging too... Though maybe it has more political connotations here in the US than it does in Japan. Still, the fundamental concept of blogspin is the same. I've noticed how much an affect it has had on the US election process; news will be released by the corporate mass media and then gets spun, respun, unspun, and unrespun ad infinitum until you get this tangled mess of truths and opinions.
For corporations, I would imagine it would be even harder to benefit from spinblogging or even the creation of a spinblog. While people can develop intense feelings, negative as well as positive, with regards to politics, I imagine it would be much more difficult to develop and keep a positive image of a corporation. And since brand image is so crucial to corporate identity and marketing, I imagine their marketing departments are even more ruthless about their public image than Karl Rove is about Bush's.
Posted by: James Vivian | October 05, 2004 at 06:47 AM