This article appears in IABC’s CW Bulletin. April 2004 Issue.

Politics Goes Blogging
By Angelo Fernando

Australian Prime Minister John Howard does it. British Labor Minister of Parliament, Tom Watson has been doing it for years. Brand-name journalists are doing it, as are writers, marketing gurus and HR people. Welcome to the world of the blog, the newest flavor on the Internet for many PR and corporate communication types.

Their value may seem small for now, because blogs are still flying under the radar. But their impact may be far reaching. “People who read blogs are thought leaders in their communities,” says John Cass, who maintains a blog dedicated to marketing communication. Blogging is a form of “community building on a very lean budget,” he says, and highly recommends it to PR and communication practitioners. Another PR blogger, Tom Murphy, discusses topics such as the PR challenge that Coca-Cola faced when it had to pull its Dasani bottled water off the shelves in the U.K. An advertising blogger, Steve Hall, says that he is reporting “on the brilliance and idiocy of the media and advertising industry.” One PR type in a listserve says that she is prepared to add “blog relations” to her repertoire.

If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, it’s because blogs fall into the category of publishing, giving someone the capacity to reach any audience while bypassing the media. For politicians, blogs are a powerful method to deliver messages to their constituents. No press conference required. For individuals, it means being heard because blogs tend to get high rankings on search engines.

Imagine for a moment that you’re the corporate communication officer of a company in 1995, and at a meeting one day, you call people’s attention to something called the World Wide Web. Eyes glaze over. The numbers guy who has heard the phrase on CNN asks you to give him a cost-benefit assessment. The CEO says it is “very interesting.” A few account managers snicker in a corner about the wisdom of putting the company on a worldwide stage when it can only market its products locally. Would anyone care, they ask, if the company added this “HTTP whatever” to a business card?

To many communicators this scenario is familiar. We all battled with this “to web or not to web” question at some time. Now replace the reference to the web with the word “blog,” and the arguments (and the reactions across the room) are oddly similar.

Is blogging a passing fad, or is it bigger than most people realize? Be cautious about dismissing it. Charles Pizzo, a frequent speaker at IABC conferences and a roving guru of PR and crisis communication says that he actually remembers a time “when IABCers doubted the value of e-mail.” Someone at an IABC chapter meeting asked him “for a mathematical formula to justify the purchase of a modem.” Suddenly blogs are everywhere. Blog software is free, and maintaining a blog is extremely easy. In other words, the investment—or the experiment—is virtually risk-free.

Like text messaging (known as SMS in many parts of the world), streaming video, HTML newsletters, web conferencing and the other varieties of peer-to-peer communication, we can be certain that blogging will be usurped by something else once it has used up its fifteen minutes of fame. But like e-mail, it may have lasting impact considering those that are actively blogging.

Pundit Bloggers
Since it is election season in many countries, politics have been the rocket fuel behind blogs’ ascent. Notorious bloggers include the pundit variety of political observers. Check out Instapundit.com, medpundit.blogspot.com and www.Lawpundit.com for a preview. Even mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times (election updates called “Times On The Trail”), The Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal) and The Guardian in London have their own blogspace. Journalists are serious bloggers—officially and privately. Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the New Republic runs a blog that gets between 200,000 to 400,000 unique visitors a month. Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News is publishing several chapters of an upcoming book on journalism on his blog. A law professor at the University of Tennessee, Glenn Reynolds, perhaps runs the most visited blog called Instapudit.com. U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism teaches it in class. Writer Seth Godin, of permission marketing fame, actively blogs as does Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor. Does this sound like a fad to you?

In the U.S., Democratic presidential candidates and political observers used blogs as a way of mobilizing support. Howard Dean lead the pack with his Blog For America, a site that engendered his grassroots campaign and was best known for its fundraising capacity. Hundreds of cities, such as santacruzforamerica and tampaforamerica, joined in. So it’s no surprise that blogs are the very stuff of campaigning. Both John Kerry and George Bush have blogs.

Flexibility of Language
Not all politicians work off of the same template. Tom Watson, a British Labour Party MP (for West Bromwich East) maintains his own blog. In fact, Watson has been blogging since 2001, long before most of the world had even heard of this form of “journal keeping” in cyberspace. In a country where over 175 Labour Party MP’s have their own web sites, Watson, the sole blogger in this group, stands out. He uses it to stimulate discussion on anything from a bill to provide free lunches to school kids to Iraq to the privacy issues of RFID tags appearing in Marks and Spencer merchandise. His blogs are often picked up by the media.

With all this blogging, shouldn’t governments be doing it as well? They probably will. Here’s one provocative reason why: A British blog called “Downing Street Says” is a place where the leaders get to rub shoulders with the man on the street. You can think of it as a proxy government blog. The “Downing Street Says” blog—unauthorised, of course—wants to take people beyond the sound-bite culture by publishing their readers’ views immediately below the transcript of the government lobby briefing.

Sooner or later, many governments might have to resort to some form of blogging in the same way that nearly every major government in the world has been driven to set up a web site—if only to be seen as more accessible. But how might a government blog? What would be its tone? Consider a pioneer in this field, Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Howard spices up the site with language such as “dude” and “hell freezes over,” vocabulary that would typically be thought as unbecoming of a head of state. But it is entirely appropriate. Here is a section from his FAQs about his editorial prerogative.

“Why did you delete my question? What kind of an insensitive, bastard of a PM are you?
That’s not a very nice thing to say. I’m sorry if I didn’t answer your question, but it was probably ’cause a) I’d already answered one that was heaps similar, b) I’d posted something in my log that was heaps similar, c) It was a stupid question or d) You’re Tony Blair. Nick off, Tony, and get your own web log. Plus, if you didn’t already know, I run a country as well as this web log, so sometimes I’m really busy at that. Like, sometimes I have to go jogging or do other PM stuff.”

That’s right, politicians have other things to do—like running the country and campaigning for survival—but some of these “things” might soon include opening a dialogue on the web and speaking in an unpretentious voice. Blogs, by definition, are not “lawyered” texts; they shun PR words and are the very antithesis of spin. As the Cluetrain Manifesto (a book that anticipated blogging without calling it a name) reminded us over and over again, “markets are conversations” motivated by passion, not press releases. In the post-Cluetrain world, communicators who want to sidestep the sound-bite culture might want to watch blogspace for the next big thing.

Angelo Fernando is a Sri Lankan-born freelance writer and member of IABC/Phoenix. He is currently the MarCom director at Imperial Capital Franchise Finance. His communication blog is at http://hoipolloi.typepad.com, and his web site is at http://www.angelofernando.com/.