Are PR people taking over the blogosphere?

Jeremy Wagstaff has raised an inportant issue in his Loose Wire Blog on worldwide PR firm Edelman's deal with Technorati. Essentially the deal is to offer localized versions of Technorati's offering in German, Korean, Italian, French and Chinese.

This deal allows Edelman to get into the analytics of tracking conversations in the blogosphere, but being a typical journalist Jeremy worries whether this means that PR people have taken over the conversation.

It is an understandable suspicion but one founded more on the misperception that PR people are into spin, that they are still stuck in the mode of command-and-control one-to-many communications and that they haven't realised that they are there to present only a good image of companies, no warts and all.

Just like there are bad journalists, there are bad PR practitioners who do all those awful stuff. They give PR a bad name. To be fair there are lots of awful PR practitioners around, just like the tons of mediocre and horrible journalists.

But where the best PR practitioners are concerned, it has always been and will always be about getting our clients to communicate with credibility — with or without the blogosphere. read more