Strengths and Weakness of Blogs in Public Relations

Michael Kent in his research paper “Critical analysis of blogging in public relations”(2008) argued that as PR researchers and PR persons, we should pay attention to how blogs can be used more effectively. He mentioned several advantages and disadvantages of PR blogs and concluded that PR blogs’ utility as public relations tool is currently limited and “Public relations professionals should not get trampled by the blogging stampede until scholars, researchers, and especially professionals actually understand them better”.

I truly agree with the strengths and weakness of PR blogs Kent mentioned in his research. Blogs can be a good tool for research, issue monitoring and environment canning. By checking what is discussed in recently PR blogs, we can infer the main topics in the PR area. And PR blogs are also excellent data gathering sites. By monitoring how individuals are interpreting and responding to organizational events and activities before such information reaches the mainstream media, public relations professionals can formulate better, and more effective responses. What’s more, PR blogs can be used as a persuasion tool to influence individuals and publics.

However, there is still weakness in PR blogs. First of all, there are quite a few organizational bloggers who are not adequately trained in public communication, or independently decide whether or not going public on an issue rather than consulting with organizational leaders. Actually this phenomenon also exists in other social media, such as twitter. In Weibo, there are lots of organizational accounts posting tweets which have quite bad influence on their corporate image. There is no doubt that this is the result of inadequate training of their Weibo account administrator. What’s more, the credibility of information from PR blogs is another big question. Actually, from my point of view, this is a problem for all social media.



resource:
Kent, M. L., 2008. Critical analysis of blogging in public relations. Public Relations Review, 34, 30-40.