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.

Some advice for city officials who are finally realizing that blogging isn’t just a passing fad:

• Blogs are a communications challenge, not a technology challenge. It has been my first hand experience over the past 15 years that city officials are too quick to look for a technological solution to most problems — especially when the “problem” seems to be related to the Internet. The challenges presented by citizen bloggers can’t be solved by your IT department. In most organizations, blogger-relations is a responsibility that is most appropriately assigned to the Public Information Officer. Your PIO should be a new media savvy individual who is capable and competent to monitor a variety of media sources, and use a range of social media tools to interact with constituents.
• We’re living in an era of conversation-based media. It’s crucial to understand that you no longer have control over any public discussion taking place about your community. Your constituents are talking about issues outside of the regularly scheduled council and commission meetings. You might want to listen to what they’re saying.
• Be proactive about monitoring the blogosphere. You should already be monitoring traditional media sources for mentions of your agency. Blogs should be monitored as part of this ongoing effort. Use tools like Google News, Technorati, and a good RSS reader to setup pre-defined searches for a variety of names and topics, including: the mayor, council members, city manager, key employees, and key project names or issues.
• Participate in the conversation. Blogs have comments for a reason. When a blogger misrepresents your organization make it a point to respond in the blog’s comment section. Surprisingly, only one official mentioned in the LA Times article is making an effort to respond to citizen bloggers. Many public officials simply ignore bloggers, or, at most, openly complain about the inaccuracy of the information on community blogs and the anonymity of the bloggers. A few officials have sought legal remedies — given the fact that there are more bloggers than lawyers, the legal approach is one that won’t scale and should only be used as a last resort, and even then only in the most extreme cases.

In my next post I’ll provide some guidelines for government agencies that are brave enough to consider blogging.

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.

It was only a matter of time before other blogs started picking up on the story — many because the blogger had received the same email message. Word spread rapidly and everyone had a good laugh at Vocus’s expense.

Talk about the wrong kind of viral marketing.

Vocus managed to recreate the exact scenario that they are allegedly trying to help their customers avoid. As blogging PR screw-ups go, this one was a classic.

So how did things go so horribly wrong for Vocus? They broke their own rules — all five of them.

Worse yet, they apparently didn’t use their own software. The company claims to have spent thousands of hours building an extensive database of the most influential bloggers. Next time they might want to compare that list against the list of addresses they’re sending their marketing email to.

To be fair, the company owned up to its mistake and even offered a fairly reasonable explanation for what had occurred. As it turns out Vocus acquired PRWeb last year. The email in question was sent to all PRWeb customers. One of the problems, though, is that none of this was explained in the email. Instead, the message came across as pure spam from a company the recipients had no previous relationship with.

My guess is that everyone at Vocus learned a valuable lesson from this experience. If nothing else they learned that the scenario portrayed in their marketing email is a very real phenomenon.

There’s quite a bit of effort involved in building and maintaining effective relationships with bloggers. It isn’t a process that can be automated. While a database of blogger contact information might be a useful starting point, it’s not a replacement for personal contact with individual bloggers.