Blogs level field for corporations and governments
Posted on July 3, 2006
Filed Under Indonesia, Internet, Lifestyle, Personality, blogging
Opinion and Editorial July 03, 2006
Ong Hock Chuan, Jakarta
Corporate communicators, journalists and PR hacks take note: Your defense minister has just started blogging. What are you going to do about it?
If conversations with professional communicators in Indonesia are anything to go by, the answer is probably nothing. The typical attitude, especially for those over 40, is that blogs are for angst-filled teenagers writing syrupy prose and bad poetry on the Net.
They couldn’t be more wrong. Blogs are very likely to change the way businesses and organizations communicate, especially when it comes to crisis and issues management. The rise of the blogging phenomenon as a force in society is well documented in publications such as Fortune, Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat, and Naked Conversations, a book co-authored by Robert Scoble, best known as Microsoft’s appointed blogger, and Shiel Israel.
Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono has apparently taken all this seriously and started blogging (www.juwonosudarsono.com) in April. So far he’s made five posts. The first was personal, having to do with the arrival of his grandson. The next were about the U.S. Secretary of Defense, development planning and the debate on Pancasila.
His last post, however, is particularly interesting from an issues management point of view and may foreshadow how businesses, organiza-tions and personalities try to engage their detractors in the future.
In a post titled Military Businesses and the Reform Process, Juwono rebuts the Human Rights Watch report of June 2006 calledHigh a Price: The Human Rights Costs of the Indonesian Military’s Economic Activities.”
So what does he achieve?
Potentially, a lot. By even going into the so-called blogosphere, Juwono is sending a strong signal that he is willing to discuss his views on matters that he cares about. He is also sending a message that he is willing to have a conversation with these stakeholders, whether they are supporters or detractors, through his blog.
By doing this he is presenting himself as an open person, and by blogging about his grandson, he also presents the human side of Juwono, the defense minister.
Through his blog he is able to engage critics like Human Rights Watch and respond blow by blow if necessary. This is something that is very difficult for an attacked party to do in the traditional media.
That is because in the traditional media, the advantage goes to the party that strikes first. A typical example would be an NGO calling a press conference to accuse, say, a mining company of pollution. It makes the front page if the accusations are sensational enough.
By the time the mining company calls a press conference to rebut the allegations, the story is downgraded to an inside page because a defense is usually not asas an accusation. By then, the damage is done, and there is little the company can do to mitigate it.
In the blogosphere, however, companies and NGOs enjoy a level playing field. An NGO can make an accusation and the company can rebut it almost in real time, as well as bringing other stakeholders into the ensuing conversation. Since most Indonesian NGOs and activists are plugged into the Net anyway,an even better medium to engage them.
There is also increasing evidence that many issues now begin in the blogosphere and only jump to the traditional media when they reach the critical point. The woes of bicycle-lock company Kryptonite,problems involving a flawed chip and other business crises were apparently caught early in the blogosphere.
So this is the best place for businesses and organizations to intercept issues before they become crises.
But for all their potential, blogs are still a relatively new phenomenon, and not a few people will be questioning whether Juwono can influence anyone at all.
Time will tell, but in the meantime, here are some figures to help you decide whether Juwono’s blog will amount to anything.
Nobody knows the total number of blogs in the world, although some experts place it at 100 million. Juwono’s blog is now ranked at 122,749 by Technorati, a web service that searches and ranks blogs by order of influence.
Technorati also says Juwono has 44 links to his blog from 26 other sites. Among those links are Komunitas Blogger Muslim, Global Voices Online and an influential Indonesian blog, Blogger Indonesia, whose author, A. Fatih Syuhud, has named Juwono the Blogger of the Week. And this is a blog that is less than three months old with only five posts (most influential bloggers post at least once a day).
Juwono is certainly creating a buzz among bloggers, many of whom would now like to see Human Rights Watch engage the minister on his criticisms of their report.
If Human Rights Watch engages Juwono then a conversation may happen, leading to, in the best circumstances, respect for each other’s views. If the former keeps mum then it would not look too good in the blogosphere as it would mean they are either so backward they do not know that the minister is creating waves on the Net, or they are too cowardly to take him on point for point.
Either way the lesson is there for companies and organizations that are frequently on the receiving end of NGO criticisms: you can potentially level the playing field with a blog.
Ong Hock Chuan is a PR consultant specializing in crisis and issues management. He can be reached via ong@maverick.co.id. His blog address is theunspunblog.com
Courtesy: The Jakarta Post
http://old.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20060703.F04
Tags: Juwono Sudarsono
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Interesting figures, i like your spelling style.
But 100 million blogs aötogether?
I think ther are more than 100 million, a good deal more…
Greets