오랫만에 블로그에 글을 남깁니다. 자주 들어와 글을 쓰려고 하는데, 최근에는 딱 마음을 먹고 주제를 잡아 쓰질 못했네요. 얼마전 에델만의 전세계 CEO인 리차드 에델만이 제게 본인의 블로그(www.edelman.com)에 들어가시면 보실 수 있습니다)에 오마이뉴스에 대해 글을 써달라는 부탁을 받고 제가 맘 잡고 쓴 글을 올려놓습니다. 역시 자극이나 압력:)이 어느정도는 있어야 글도 쓰게 되나 봅니다. 아래 글을 리차드 에델만의 블로그에 가셔도 보실 수 있습니다. 오늘 비가 내리네요. 주위에 밝은 색을 자주 쳐다보시면서 기분 좋은 하루 되시기 바랍니다. 湖
Oh my news vs. Oh my PR!
Hoh Kim, Managing Director, Edelman Korea
One of the key elements of democracy is participatory democracy, democracy where anyone who wants to participate is guaranteed the right to do so. In journalism, however, it took a long time before participatory democracy was made a reality. One-way journalism was taken as a matter of course. The idea that professional reporters write and that citizens become readers was accepted as truth.
As citizen reporters, however, you have changed that. You have made one-way journalism into two-way journalism. Citizens are no longer spectators. A new era has begun in which regular citizens can become reporters whenever they so desire, and by doing so contribute to public opinion.
(Oh, Yeon-Ho, the founder of Ohmynews.com. at his speech at the Ohmynews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum, June 24, 2005.)
On June 24th, 2005, more than three hundred citizen reporters from twenty-five countries gathered in Seoul for the Ohmynews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum, including a 10 year old American elementary school student and also another citizen reporter from Chile who had to fly 31 hours. In this forum, there were presentations ranging from a professor from the Missouri J-school to another professor from City University of London.
Here many interesting things happen in Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world. As you may have seen Richard’s blog on May 11th entitled “Citizen Journalists,” ohmynews, which was opened at 2:22 p.m. on the 22nd of February, 2000 (interesting timing, Oh told that he intentionally chose that moment to say goodbye to 20th century journalism), is becoming a power in Korean society as well as in the global journalism arena. In 2003, ohmynews was ranked the 6th most influential news media among all kinds of Korean media by the weekly Sisa Journal, one of the major Korean weeklies. In terms of the number of visitors, it is ranked 16th in Korea. Time magazine selected ohmynews international as one of the 50 coolest websites 2005.
Recently, I was visiting SBS-TV homepage, one of the national TV stations in Korea, and found the announcement of “Uporter.” According to SBS-TV, Uporter means both “Ubiquitous reporter” and “You’re the reporter.” Basically, they apply ohmynews model into the broadcast. Anybody can be an Uporter and write stories using a blog and mobile phone.
What do the ohmynews-ation mean, especially for PR professionals?
In the past, “some people” who have journalist as their title could write stories to be placed in print or broadcast. Now, virtually anybody can write stories from anywhere on anything. What will this mean to PR?
There are two aspects of PR: promotion(promoting good news) and protection(protect reputation from worst situations, i.e. crisis). Let me think of the influence of ohmynews on PR in these two contexts. First, promotion. Traditionally, information flow is like this, if I can simplify: a company PR department/PR firm writes a press release and pitches it to journalists à journalists write articles à the public reads the articles and is influenced. Of course, this flow will be continued for traditional media, but, what if a citizen journalist – who can be your ex- and current employees, dissatisfied customers who were not journalists in a traditional sense but now can be a citizen journalist, etc. – have different, sometimes opposing view points, regarding corporate key messages or promoting items, and write something about it? This means that leveraging inside out PR and word of mouth marketing will have more impact in this age. You have to create brand trust and excitement from inside out, not just towards the external world. Also, while you still target traditional/professional journalists, you have to consider your communication environment where “every citizen is a reporter.” We no longer can rely on media coverage, but have to build trust, rather than image from the inside out, and create a word of mouth effect on your messages to virtually every stakeholder group. The Edelman Trust Barometer Study pointed out that more and more people trust “people like yourself” rather than celebrities or politicians. This is the age when “people like yourself” can write a story as a citizen journalist and place it in the media like ohmynews.com.
Second, protection. In a crisis situation, where you try to protect your company’s reputation, still the inside out approach will remain very important, meaning internal public should buy into your protecting key messages and position statement. Further, paradox of transparency will be massively important in crisis management. Murphy’s law states that “if something can go wrong, it will.” Well, if there can be a new PR Murphy’s law, it will say “if something goes normal, the truth about your crisis will be revealed by a citizen reporter.”
“Every citizen is a reporter.” that is a belief and journalism model of ohmynews. If we think about PR in a traditional sense where PR targets reporters, now it’s the age where we can say “PR targets every citizen (who can be reporter any time).” This is why trust, word of mouth, and paradox of transparency are critically important. If there can be ohmyPR, the motto will be “We engage virtually every citizen in the PR communication process in a way we can build trust.” We live in incredibly interesting times, both for journalists and for PR professionals.
Let me conclude this blog by quoting Jeremy Iggers who delivered his speech at the forum:
“What I learned……is that people are very eager to have a different kind of relationship to their newspaper, to not only be spectators, and information consumers, but to play a more active role, to speak and to be heard.”
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