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Balancing Blogs' Credibility

By Shel Holtz
Expert Author
Article Date: 2005-07-05

In yesterday's "For Immediate Release," I noted that Joseph Edward Duncan had maintained a blog. Duncan, in case you're not following the story, was found in a Coeur d'Alene, Idaho restaurant with a young girl who, along with her brother, had been missing for about six weeks following the disocvery of the bludgeoned bodies ofher mother, her mother's boyfriend, and an older brother.

The blog is no longer available, but archives of posts can be read on the Internet Archive and in IN-Forum of Fargo, North Dakota. The final two entries are, according to one commentator, "highly distressing, so don't read them unless you want to be REALLY upset..."

The story is noteworthy as a bit of balance to the purist belief that blogs and the authentic human voice applied to posts are some sort of panacea for communication. Duncan blogged in an authentic human voice. Sick, but authentic.

Now, today comes a line buried in an AP story appearing across the web in online newspapers about the release of Karla Homolka, the notorious Canadian serial killer who was released as part of her plea bargain that resulted in her testimony against her ex-husband, Paul Bernardo. Here's the paragraph:

Earlier Monday, one of her attorneys, Christian Lachance, told Quebec Superior Court Judge Maurice Lagace that his client was too afraid to testify at the hearing to consider a media blackout. Because Homolka's safety could not be assured by police, he said the media must be prevented from reporting her whereabouts to protect her from threats against her life, mostly by Internet bloggers.

Homolka doesn't deserve a pass for her horrific crimes, but it doesn't serve the cause of blogging purists when most of the death threats are coming from bloggers. Instead, it reinforces the perception many still have of blogs as the communication vehicle of choice for people on the fringe, the not-quite-normal.

Of course, this perception is wrong, but (as any PR person worth his or her salt can recite in his or her sleep), perception is reality. CEOs and other business leaders who keep reading about these ignoble uses of blogs will be more inclined to dismiss their potential as a corporate communication channel. "Why would I want to put our organization out there in the company of weirdos and perverts?"

Business blogging purists insist that a blog must conform to an ideal. Character blogs, for example, deviate from the idea and therefore must be resisted. But in the real world, where blogs are used for whatever, there is no compulsion to adhere to any idea. People use blogs for whatever they want.

Business blogs should certainly adhere to principles of effective communication. In a strategic planning process, a business goal would have to be supported by the use of a blog and measurable outcomes produced. We should understand the medium well enough to avoid embarrassing the company or earning the contempt of our audiences.

But the increasing of blogs for impure purposes should help us understand that blogs are, ultimately, a tool, and like any tools, they can be used for good or (can you hear it coming?) evil. They can be used for companies to engage in a meaningful dialogue with customers, for authors to solicit feedback on comleted first drafts of chapters of their books, for soap operas, to presentnew fiction, as a way to bring a fictitious character to life, for individuals to opine about issues of the day, for death threats, and as outlets for one's sickness.

The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can position blogs as tools, presenting them as solutions to specific communication problems rather than as the solution to all communication problems.

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About the Author:
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

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Balancing Blogs' Credibility