What would you do if Wal-Mart or a big petro-chemical company approached you, asking if you’d blog positively about their products, services or corporate policies? According to a New York Times article, big corporations, including Wal-Mart, are enlisting bloggers to become part of their PR offensive. The paper claims that although Wal-Mart and it’s PR agency stop short of offering cash for posts, they do provide bloggers with "nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters."
Whilst I’m no fan of Wal-Mart’s business practices, I don’t find myself particularly offended by this approach, a technique I’ve long thought charities and grassroots political campaigners should do more of. The idea is to build relationships with friendly bloggers and feed them exclusive content, letting them use that content to build support for your cause, if not for your organisation, from the ground up. I’m thinking, for example, Amnesty making photos of an inhumane prison available to bloggers, or Greenpeace giving a blogger the opportunity to do a podcast from a anti-whaling operation.
Robin,
I’m constantly amazed by the way that people see every new campaigning initiative as one that can benefit pressure groups – either corporate ones or ‘grassroots’ ones.
We are a representative democracy in the UK. If you drop any 50 political academics in a room and let them talk for an hour, they will generally come to the conclusion that much of our democratic malaise (if there is one)is rooted in a decline in that ‘representative’ quality. The media is too powerful, Political Parties are too powerful, the Civil Service are too inscrutable, pressure groups are too powerful, etc.
Therefore, I’d suggest that the real opportunity here is for people who do understand the problems of representation to be recruited by representatives (I’m particularly thinking of local Councillors here). This, I beleive, would lead to a significant improvement in the quality of democracy.
I suppose you are already aware of Burson Marsteller’s E-fluentials program, where they advise business on how to “recruit” online movers and shakers who can shape the opinions and attitudes of the Internet community.
I agree that NGOs should do more of this (Greenpeace sent a cyberactivists, who blogged the experience, to their office in the Amazon forest), but Wal-Mart’s move is a reaction to the general opposition to its bad practices. In a similar way Shell decided to open an online forum on their website as a result of the protests against the Nigeria/Ogoni/Brent Spar case. However this is different for an NGO, although it could use a very similar tactic, it already has the advantage of speaking to a broad audience of like-minded people, which Wal-Mart, and other Burson Marsteller’s clients, hasn’t at the moment.
I remember using Tell Shell (http://www.shell.com/home/tellshell-en/html/iwgen/tell_shell/app_frame_tellshell.html) as a good example of how a company faced with negative criticism online can engage with those who oppose them in a way that is, or at least looks like it is, positive. Then Shell seemed to forget about their forums, leaving them online but apparently unmoderated and making shell look unresponsive. After your comment, I’ve had a look again and it would appear that Shell still has the feature on their site.
When I give workshops to organisations setting up online communities, one of the first points I try to get across is that people post, positive or negative, because they care. If they say they don’t like something your company or organisation is doing they have a choice – simply go somewhere else or try to do something about it by engaging with you in an attempt to change or improve the way you do things. There’s an online community technique that often works in these situations: rather than getting bogged down in the negative, when a website visitor posts criticism, try to make it constructive. Ask them what ideas they might have for resolving the problem. Sadly, this is about as far as many community managers get but the key to it’s success is to actually follow that constructive criticism up and try to inform others in your organisation about what users are saying. I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent there but, well, I guess you’re all somewhat used to it…
;-)
You’re absolutely right, in fact Tell Shell was very innovative for those times. And, as the Wal Mart’s, or Burson Marsteller’s, case shows, NGOs are somewhat lagging behind, even if they have a support companies just dream of.