Q&A: Dealing With the Digital Influence of Bloggers

By ELVA RAMIREZ
October 30, 2006; Page R2

Public relations professionals have always wrestled with protecting and managing their clients' image. But blogs are forcing publicists to rethink their tactics for mitigating bad word-of-mouth.

As social media become more sophisticated, public relations firms debate not only about how best to tap into the wisdom of the masses, but they also seek to grasp the protean nature of the public sphere.

John Bell, managing director of 360 Degree Digital Influence at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, answered some questions about how public relations experts can manage, and in some ways, prevent trash-talking by bloggers.

WSJ.com: Your title contains the term "Digital influence." That sounds so ineffable.

Mr. Bell: It's not meant to be a bunch of jargon. What we do in public relations [is study how] how influence is wielded. We're all influenced in more complex ways everyday.

[There has been a] shifting balance of trust [where] people are trusting word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer more than they are traditional media, marketing. People are relying much more on peer-to-peer recommendations than anything else.

And also [with] the explosion of technology, things are changing. The Internet is changing public relations overall.  So that's what digital influence is and that's what my team focuses on.

WSJ.com: How does one manage or control digital influence?

Mr. Bell: The interesting thing about digital influence is that control is the wrong word. You can't really control everything. What we can do is getting get involved in the conversation. When we're [dealing with] bloggers for instance, our best strategy is to start to talk them as fellow bloggers. Many of us are bloggers, myself included.

[We should] be transparent about who we are and what our goals are. It sounds naïve on some levels, but our best strategy is to have an honest, authentic discussion with those people who are important to us on a particular issue or [for] a particular client.

WSJ.com: What has been the biggest gamechanger in PR since the advent of the blog era?

Mr. Bell: The biggest change typified by the emergence of blogs, and social media in general, is that it's no longer ok for [public relations firms] to just throw messages over the transom. It doesn't work very well. I'm not sure it ever did, quite frankly. Now the challenge is for us to have the confidence, if you will, to have a conversation with our constituents, our third parties, our detractors. Having a conversation means you say something, they say something, you say something. It's an open dialogue. It's a more open model than interruptive marketing.

WSJ.com: Is there such a thing as an unpowerful blogger?

Mr. Bell: Oh sure. There's between 55 and 60 million blogs out there. I believe in the long tail and it gets pretty thin out there at the end of the tail.

We actually have a model for defining influence. We look at what the affiliation of the blogger is, if they have one. We look at the links into their blog, which has a lot to do with their Technorati ranking. We look at the level of activity, in terms of [how recent are] posts and comments. We look at how many people subscribe to their RSS feed.

We do look at the qualitative nature of their topic, obviously. Are they initiating conversations on certain topics or are they just responding? We try to understand the polarity of the discussion, positive, negative, [and] neutral. But [this] criteria [can] give you a pretty good barometer.

WSJ.com: Some bloggers have been increasingly vocal about problems with products. At what point does chatter become bad PR?

Mr. Bell: A company who makes a product needs to understand whether there is a problem with their product. And there's a couple of simple ways to do that: One is to test your product ad nauseum. But none of that is foolproof. Another way is to aggressively listen to the users using the product. When there's a problem, you respond to it quickly.

This is anecdotal but I remember that [after] one release of a Microsoft operating system, there were a lot of bugs and patches and so on. And Microsoft was very good about being ever-present in the discussion. [Whenever] they saw [something] on a message board, they would then proactively respond or more often rather than not, quickly create the fix and make it available as quickly as possible. So they had a very good customer service response mechanism. Speed is of the essence here.

WSJ.com: What are the dangers of viral marketing?

Mr. Bell: I think the dangers of viral marketing have to do with the dangers of misleading people. And openness and transparency. And those are two different things, actually.

A popular example would be lonelygirl15. [The creators] went to great lengths to produce a program that felt authentic. It felt real. Well, as we all know, it was the brainchild of a couple of folks and it was fiction. And my theory is that many people have an appetite for fiction. You run the risk of alienating some people when you reveal that it's a trick.

If that had turned out to be a marketer, the backlash would have been much more severe. And the reality is, they actually pulled in a much larger audience to their core Web site than they had before. They did anger a lot of people but they also grew what I call their "authentic audience," those people that knew it was fiction but liked it anyhow.

As marketers, we believe in and support the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association's ethics guidelines, which boil down to: Be honest. Be transparent. Don't trick people.

Write to Elva Ramirez at elva.ramirez@wsj.com¹