Big blogger is watching you! Reputation management in an opinionated, hyperlinked world.

Blogs are the new Fourth Estate. This nascent hyperlink-laden new media format is really a global inter-network of information, rumour, research and media deconstruction--an inter-net within the Internet. Bloggers are the eyes and ears of the world, encroaching on what was once the role of journalists and watchdog organizations. They often take it upon themselves to keep tabs on politicians, entertainers, environmentalists and lobbies. They could soon be monitoring your organization as well!

Gary Bivings, founder of the Bivings Group, a hot-shot PR firm, knows all about that. Bivings has written on and follows blogs. His firm has been closely watched, and pilloried online, by people keeping tabs on Monsanto, one of his clients.

Or, consider blogger Tim Withers. He began the "adopt-a-journalist" phenomenon, tracking every word written by New York Times reporter Jody Wilgoren. His analysis of her column is now blogged on a dedicated web site called the "Wilgoren Watch" (http://wilgorenwatch.blogspot.com).

Then there's Kevin Drum, who maintains a blog at Calpundit.com (which has since moved to The Washington Monthly) that analyzes everything that comes out of the White House press briefings and the media coverage of the George W. Bush campaign.

What's going on here? Fact checking or muckraking? Unfortunately, blogging does not fall into convenient slots and cannot be explained away in journalism-speak. Blogs are neither the stuff of "60 Minutes" nor "The Drudge Report," but a form of "citizen journalism."

The best way to get a handle on the scope of blogs is to survey what's out there and view them within some broad classifications--even though they certainly will be broken out into a dozen categories by year end.

Journalist blogs are quite the rage--a reason why many journalism schools such as Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, have started paying attention to blogs. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC have journalists blogging away. The most invigorating thing about blogging is that readers provide instant feedback. For journalists, it gets them up-close with their "former audience," a term used by Dan Gillmor, blogging for the San Jose Mercury News (http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor). Others say it gives them an opportunity to cover stories their employer will not assign them for a variety of reasons.

Then there are citizen journalists who are making sure that what's important and newsworthy isn't determined by media organizations, but by people in their local communities. They aren't necessarily professional scribes. "Trial Diary" (www.trialdiary.com) is a true "log" of Donna Larsen, a communication manager, and Hilary Mohr, a philosophy student, reporting on a complex murder trial under way in Seattle.

Corporate blocs may seem tame by comparison, but if you read between the lines there is a high probability that this genre will explode (see sidebar). The best example of a corporate blog is maintained by Microsoft employee Robert Scoble, better known as "Scobleizer" in blogspace (http://scoble.weblogs.com). Scoble's "Weblog Manifesto" has caught the attention of many in the PR and marketing world, if only because it is written in the style of "The Cluetrain Manifesto."

As for political blogs, these are the wallpaper of the blogosphere, and take the form of daily rants. In the U.S., the "Dean For America" blog got people's attention as a mobilizing force, more than a news source. It now has its counterpart in the John Kerry and George W. Bush campaigns. More interesting are the blocs maintained by politicos such as Australian Prime Minister John Howard, British Labor MP Tom Watson and Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the media savvy vice president of Iran's Parliamentary Legal Affairs. Howard, for instance is often irreverent and folksy; Abtahi speaks with passion about religion and education. Unlike official web sites, their blogs come off as hype-free and non-posturing.

Blogging in PR, Marketing Communications and Advertising is less of a place to rant, and more of a format to uplift the profession and push the envelope. "People who read blogs are thought-leaders in the community," says John Cass, an early PR blogger, who maintains one for the community-building opportunity it gives him.

How does all this affect you, the communicator, nicely crafting a press release in your PR or marketing department this morning, ready to upload it to PRNewsWire.com?

Stop thinking of "distribution" channels and start thinking of "conversation" channels. Bloggers use a mechanism called "syndication," which is a fancy name for linking to other blogs and news sources. This incestuous information sharing is sometimes derided as creating an echo chamber effect. From a PR point of view, it also amplifies a message, spreading it in real time. People don't just read blogs; they contribute to the post, tell others about them and link to them. Search engines, which often rank sites based on the number of links to the sites' pages, naturally favor blogs. Therein lies the opportunity and the challenge. In blogspace, these conversations could take place with or without your approval.

There are ways around this. You can set up your own company blog, effectively providing those who have a burning desire to rant a place to do it. Macromedia, Bankstocks.com and Quotium Technologies use this strategy. Check out Quotium's blog at http://webloadtesting.typepad.com.

Communicators need to keep their ears to the ground, visit those sites that typically attract people who have an axe to grind, and respond or get in on the discussion. Unless the blogger has a nefarious motive, he/she will be willing to leave your response unedited--though a blogger can delete a response and not acknowledge it.

The hottest topic right now is whether a company or a PR firm should pitch stories to bloggers, since blogs are becoming more specialized with very large audiences. But if you go there, know that there is etiquette to follow, and that you are treading on dangerous ground.

As blogs mature, their segments fragment and their readership grows, bloggers will become more cautious about where they source their information, and more selective about what they write. They will certainly be watching you. Make sure you are tracking them as well!

ON-DEMAND BLOG BROWSING

The habit of bloggers to reference each other is called "syndication." The engine behind this syndication is software called RSS. You don't need to know much about RSS to use it. You can now download an RSS "newsreader" (also known as an "aggregator" in tech-speak) that automatically trolls the Internet and grabs news from sites that have set themselves up to syndicate or share information. Then, every day when you fire up your RSS newsreader, you have only the news you want. Some newsreaders integrate with your e-mail browser, storing news feeds in a separate folder in your inbox.

FOUND IN BLOGSPACE

CORPORATE BLOG: Robert Scoble's web log (http://scoble.weblogs.com); carries the "Weblog Manifesto" at http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html

MEDIA BLOG: LA Times (www.lacomfidential.com); The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk/weblog)

JOURNALIST BLOG: http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor

PUNDIT BLOG: Maintained by Glenn Reynolds, a part-time musician and law professor at the University of Tennessee (instapundit.com)

LEGAL BLOG: www.trialdiary.com/aboutus.htm

WATCH BLOG: Columbia Journalism Review set up its own blog, called Campaign Desk, tracking the 2004 election campaign in the U.S. (www.campaigndesk.org)

ADVERTISING BLOG: Steve Hall's frequently updated blog on all things advertising (www.adrants.com)

THE CORPORATE BLOGGER

A recent mutual fund scandal turned the microscope on a company called Pimco, prompting the company to take out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal in February. The long copy declares that in the face of newspaper articles (obviously unfavorable), the company's CIO and CEO are putting their signatures to "this personally written letter in an attempt to briefly explain our side of the story." Full-page ads and CEOs on camera may have been a powerful strategy in the time of the Tylenol-tampering scare. But this strategy has limited value in a real-time media climate.

On the day after the Pimco ad appeared, a blog (bankstocks.com) run by former Wall Street analyst Tom Brown appears smack in the face of the "letter," with a portfolio manager speculating as to why the Pimco CIO "will not shut up." He went on to dissect the language of the letter, suggesting there was a hidden admission of guilt.

Remember, this is a corporate blogger who belongs to a hedge fund, not some rebellious geek who took a journalism class. Bloggers like this don't just challenge companies and their PR, but they make you wonder if the traditional media-centric damage-control efforts are suddenly obsolete.

Angelo Fernando is marketing communications director at Imperial Capital Bank, and a freelance writer, based in Tempe, Ariz., USA, covering business, marketing, media and technology. His bloc is at http://hoipolloi.typepad.com.