I scoffed when a representative from Lake Superior State University, appearing on MSNBC's "Countdown" (my favorite cable news show) issued the university's 2006 "Many who nominated it were unsure of the meaning. Sounds like something your mother would slap you for saying. "Sounds like a Viking's drink that's better than grog, or a technique to kill a frog." Teri Vaughn, Anaheim, Calif. "Maybe it's something that would be stuck in my toilet." Adrian Whittaker, Dundalk, Ontario. "I think the words journal' and diary' need to come back." T. J. Allen, Shreveport, La The first two comments suggest a word should be banned if some people don't know what it means and don't like how it sounds. By that standard, we'd eliminate 30% of the words in the dictionary. It's the last comment, though, that warrants some discussion. It seems to have become a popular notion that more general terms should be used to replace specific labels with narrower meanings. In this case, a "journal" or "diary" could be on paper as easily as they could be online. Paper diaries record intimate thoughts, often that people wouldn't want shared. Blogs use blogging software and incorporate the technology enabled by the software, such as commenting, trackbacks, and the like. Say "journal" and people will wonder what kind. Say "blog" and people will know just what you're talking about. The same reasoning bubbled up in my mind when I read a post yesterday from Chuck Tanowitz's Media Metamorphosis blog in which Tanowitz expressed his disdain for the term "blogger relations:" During a recent lunch conversation with John Cass, he and I argued over the term "blogger relations." Personally, I think it's a lousy term. He believes it's the hot term of 2006. I'd like to suggest another: Open Communications. I'm thinking about this in the same vein as Open Source, that is, a way for everyone to contribute to the conversation. It's a way of simply better expressing what is going on today, and giving a label for corporations to attach to this to differentiate it from traditional PR, media relations and advertising. At a certain point all of this becomes one and all falls under the general "communications" umbrella, but we're not there yet. For now, it's all about being Open. From where I sit, "blogger relations" has specific meaning. It's the alternative to "media relations," coined because public relations practitioners cannot approach bloggers the same way they can pitch media. Blogger relations should, of course, be open. But there's more to it than that. It is a useful term, for now, as the principles of employing blogs in a public relations context are defined and codified. The author of the 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 blogSuggest a Correction
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