In the old days, gadflies would show up at city council meetings and wait through excruciating discussions about arcane public policy issues, in exchange for two minutes at the podium during the pre-appointed time for public comments. These days, most gadflies can’t be bothered to leave the house for a two minute rant at the end of a long council meeting. They’re all too busy updating their blogs.

According to a recent LA Times article, more than a few city officials are finally waking up to the fact that large corporations have been aware of for a while now: When your customers/constituents have a problem with your organization they are increasingly inclined to tell the world about it on their blog.

The old rules of public communications are being turned upside down in the new era of conversation-based media. For city officials who haven’t bothered to keep current on the latest trends in the blogosphere, this news comes as a startling wake-up call.

The problem is that many government agencies have Web 1.0 tunnel vision, and are not ready for a Web 2.0 world. From the beginning, government agencies have used the web as a low-cost one-way publishing medium. In some cases they’ve developed eGovernment initiatives to streamline labor intensive processes and provide better constituent service.

Very few agencies have used the web as an opportunity to engage their constituency in an ongoing discussion about the issues of the day. Blogs make this engagement unavoidable. Citizen bloggers are having these conversation whether or not city officials choose to participate. Simply avoiding gadfly bloggers won’t make them go away.

(Read more of City Hall vs. the Blogging Gadflies)

Marketing Guru Joe Vitale is excited to find an entry on himself in Wikipedia. Who wouldn’t be happy to find themselves listed in the world’s most widely read encyclopedia?

Joe suggests to his readers that “It might be a sound marketing move to list you, your product or service on Wikipedia”. While that may be a good idea for some business owners, it may not be right for everyone. It may seem counter-intuitive, but, a listing in Wikipedia isn’t always a good thing.

Here are some guidelines to keep in mind to ensure that your Wikipedia entry is an asset and not a liability:

(Read more of Wikipedia and You: Best Practices For Businesses and Marketers)

As I mentioned in a previous post, we’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future or the publishing industry. We all know that technology is transforming the music, television, and motion picture businesses, but few people realize how significantly technology and new media will alter the book business. It’s a time of great change, and tremendous opportunity for publishers who embrace the future.

The Oxford Media Works team was fortunate enough to attend the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in San Jose last week. The event was designed to immerse publishers in the future. This was the inaugural TOC conference, and we have every reason to believe that it has already established itself as the premier conference for publishing industry technology (never mind the fact that it may very well be the only conference in that category, it was still a fine event nonetheless).

(Read more of Team Coverage of the O’Reilly TOC Conference)

Blogger relations are an increasingly important aspect of corporate public relations work. Unfortunately, many PR professionals still don’t quite get the blogosphere. All too many assume that they can simply send an impersonal form letter or press release out to their mailing list, then sit back and wait for the free publicity to roll in. More often than not this approach invites ridicule from bloggers and can lead to a surprising amount of negative publicity. Exactly the opposite of what was intended.

The problem is so prevalent that a company named Vocus has developed a software solution designed to help PR professionals communicate more effectively with bloggers. To promote their new product, Vocus has released a white paper titled “Five Golden Rules For Blogger Relations”. We learned about the white paper earlier this week when the Vocus marketing department sent out an impersonal form letter to their entire mailing list — including a number of high profile bloggers.

Brian Clarke at Copyblogger was clearly amused, and a little insulted. He quoted most of the email message in a post, including the bit about the worst case scenario where bloggers might quote your email in an attempt to ridicule your company.

(Read more of An Army Of Bloggers Can Ruin Your Day)

We spend quite a bit of time thinking about new media and the future of the publishing industry. It’s clear that some major changes are taking place that will fundamentally alter the world of publishing. It’s really just a matter of how soon, and who will benefit by taking advantage of the new opportunities that are presenting themselves.

Unfortunately, it sometimes appears that the publishing world at large is oblivious to these new opportunities. If publishers are taking advantage of new media and the social web, we aren’t hearing much about their efforts. And yet, something tells me that there must be innovators out there who are blazing the trail that the rest of the industry will soon follow.

Over on our Booksquare blog we’ve just put out a call for examples of innovative uses of new media in the publishing industry. If you’re a publisher, author, agent, or publicist, and you’re doing something interesting and unique online we’d like to hear more about it.

We hope to use our findings in a series of posts that will highlight new opportunities for those in the publishing industry. Depending on what we uncover we may also include examples in our upcoming report “New Media Best Practices for Publishing Industry Professionals”.

Technorati Tags: Publishing, New Media