PR meets the WWW / Constantin Basturea’s weblog

Communication has emerged as a necessary object of attention in the 20th century, not because it’s new, but because it’s that portion of the social organism now undergoing elephantiasis.

Marshall McLuhan (1969, Counterblast)

Congratulations to:

• Giovanni Rodriguez, for his promotion as a principal for Eastwick
• Steve Rubel, for his new job as a Senior Vice President at Edelman
• … and belated congrats to Jeremy Pepper, for joining Weber Shandwick’s team.

Also, congratulations to our fellow PR bloggers who celebrated recently a year or more since they started their weblogs:

• Ryan May (first entry)
• Hans Kulin (first entry)
• David Parmet (first entry)
• Marc Snyder (first entry)
• John Wagner (first entry)
• Eric Eggertson (first entry).
• Italo Vignoli (first entry) (with my apologies to Italo)

And thank you for being here.

Harold Burson launches a blog on his 85th anniversary, and Al Golin “shares his perspective and wisdom from his first 50 years in the business” in a video podcast (also available on iTunes). We’re living in interesting times :)

Nancy White:

[I]t is chic to glorify conversation the way we used to glorify “community.”

As far as I know, this is the first article on the use of weblogs in online public relations published by a peer-reviewed scholarly journal:

Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2) (Technorati cosmos | RSS feed) (del.icio.us cosmos | RSS)

Tom Kelleher and Barbara M. Miller, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract

This study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategies appropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new measures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites. Participants assigned to the blog condition perceived an organization’s “conversational human voice” to be greater than participants who were assigned to read traditional Web pages. Moreover, perceived relational strategies (conversational human voice, communicated relational commitment) were found to correlate significantly with relational outcomes (trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, commitment).

This is a great step toward the recognition of weblogs as a legitimate and important tool in public relations, and examplifies the resources and insights that academic research have to offer, of which the majority of PR practitioners are oblivious to.

Bonus link: Tom Kelleher’s weblog: Public Relations Online - Thoughts & Theory