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)

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)