Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Who's blogging in Australian PR? ... Bueller?

Just back from the PR & Corporate Communications Summit and an interesting presentation from Gerry McCusker of the PR Disasters blog. What was most surprising was the response from the audience to a question Gerry posed.
Who is blogging? Gerry counted six hands out of around 120. I found that astounding!
Granted, I'm far from the world's most regular blogger and, though I wrote my first blog post back in 2004, this one has existed only for a few short months -- so my reaction may be hypocritical.
I appreciate too that having worked for two of the largest names in IT I've also been exposed to Web 2.0 (for want of a better term) more than most people working in PR.
And yes, I had the chance to see (albeit mostly from the side-lines here in Australia) how a large multinational, Dell, virtually turned on a dime in its approach to Web 2.0 and became a poster child.
But I can't help wondering, why aren't people who've demonstrated (by attending the seminar) that they want to learn also engaged in the single most influential change in the industry in 20 years?
Having defended this last week, I'm now wondering if Lee is right.
Personally, I've always had a short attention span for articles on PR itself but there are some excellent blogs by PR people around, including several from here in Australia (check my blogroll).

PostScript: I think this post from Shel Israel somes up the opportunity for communications people.