F.A.D.S.

We went to the PRSA social media luncheon earlier this week, and it turned out to be pretty interesting. And the food was good, for a change! We weren’t going to blog about this. But yesterday, we saw that one of the panelists, the Chicago Tribune’s Eric Benderoff, blogged on it. As if that wasn’t a sign we should jump in, the comments on his blog got us talking.

 

Molli: Did Cyrano just call Eric a knucklehead?

 

Brigitte: Pretty much. Didn’t he realize he was commenting on a blog?

 

Molli: Well, once we get these comment IDs, we’ll see if he’s still leaving harsh comments like that when they’re linked back to his true personal profile.

 

Brigitte: No kidding! I agree with Eric that the anonymous comments are out of control. But they weren’t just attacking him. We PR people got our share of flack.

 

Molli: Don’t people understand that we, as PR people, aren’t trying to control the conversation? We just give bloggers ideas for new things to talk about it.

 

Brigitte: Right, and then it’s out of our hands. We don’t write the posts for the bloggers.

 

Molli: And then it’s up to the public to comment. We take those comments for better or worse – and learn from them.

 

Brigitte: It makes me crazy how everyone perceives PR people as being some sort of master manipulators. How would that even be possible?

 

Molli: Well, you know, I do offer a cut of my paycheck if a blogger says something nice. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always liquor.

 

Brigitte: Haha. But seriously, Molli, our clients have a right to participate in the conversations about their organizations. We help them do that. That’s all there is to it.

 

Molli: I couldn’t agree with you and Eric more. Once clients decide to go into the social media world, there are risks. It’s a risk you have to be willing to take. We don’t try to change the negative. We want to hear what people are saying.

 

Brigitte: So, to our readers, to anonymous commenters, to luncheon-goers: What do you think?

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 11:24 am and is filed under Bloggers, Blogging, Chicago Tribune, ChicagoTribune.com, Citizen journalism, PRSA, PRSA Chicago, blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.