New Media: Is PR getting left behind?

When I was working for my last employer (a local authority for a major UK city), my colleague made an educational film for local schools, tackling an issue she was working on. While she wanted to put the film on Youtube, Corporate Communications insisted that she could only do so with viewer comments disabled. She proceeded as instructed, and for a while we heard nothing.

Some days later however, the video was picked up by a local MP. Dismayed at the restrictions imposed on it, he had reuploaded the videos, this time with comments enabled. My collegue found that people were viewing (and commenting on) his version of the video, and took this finding to Corporate Communications. Only then did they relent, and authorise comments on the council's version of the film.

The intention of this vignette is to illustrate that the internet is no place for control freakery. Even where an organisation tries to restrict debate for fear of criticism, it is likely that the debate will surface elsewhere. When organisation establishes a presence on the internet, it should understand that in doing so, it is expected to "join the conversation".

This should be a wonderful thing, especially for organisations like local councils which have a deeply rooted reputation as inert, non-responsive institutions. However, it is understandable that an organisation may be unwilling to open the floodgates - in doing so, it is likely to discover public relations challenges it never knew existed.

(Thats good news for us by the way!)