Companies in Silicon Valley are now increasingly using blogs to announce layoffs, according to this article in New York Times. In fact, they are having to do it because if they don’t someone else will. So many employees have personal blogs and Twitter feeds that news travels instantly.

"Today, whatever you say inside of a company will end up on a blog," said Rusty Rueff, a former human resources executive at Electronic Arts and PepsiCo. "So you have a choice as a company — you can either be proactive and take the offensive and say, 'Here's what's going on,' or you can let someone else write the story for you."

Yes, it is based on Silicon Valley, an extreme case, but it probably won’t be long before this need is much more widespread, and it is worth considering when you have bad news, or even when your employees think you might have bad news, whether you want to be the one who announces it or whether you would prefer to leave it to somebody else. If you want to appear open and honest, that’s a pretty clear choice, and maybe in itself sufficient reason to start your corporate blog.

Sometimes living in Switzerland can be a little puzzling for foreigners like me. Familiar things are done just that little bit differently. This example gave me a real surprise, for example - Migros, Switzerland's biggest supermarket and retail chain and one of its biggest companies, decided to use Web 2.0 tools to involve the public in redefining its product range, as reported by Barnaby Skinner for the country's Sonntagszeitung newspaper. Fine, so far, but in order to keep any new ideas to itself, the company decided to restrict the blog's four sections - "wellness", cosmetics, household products and Migros employees - to a community of 50 users each (calling the policy "first at the pool"). Very productive bloggers will get SFr. 100 each.

So what is strange about this? Well, it's basically another customer focus group but with a different vehicle. Using a closed version of Web 2.0 in a social network for this seems a bit, well, pointless really. Comments from Jorg Dietz of Nielsen Netratings to that effect made me smile:

Allerdings befürchtet er, dass in einer Community von bezahlten Bloggern ein verzerrtes Marktbild entstehe. Ein richtiges Anreizsystem sei ausschlaggebend für gute Inhalte, ansonsten würden Vielschreiber nur ihr Sackgeld aufbessern wollen.

Das grösste Problem ist jedoch die Abgeschlossenheit. Web-2.0-Gemeinschaften wie Wikipedia oder Myspace leben vom freien Informationsaustausch und -zugang... Er vergleicht diese Marktforschungsmethode mit jemandem, der gewaschen werden will, ohne dabei nass zu werden.

To paraphrase, Dietz thinks Migros hasn't quite got it, and that paying people regardless of content encourages them to write anything for a bit more pocket money. Dietz also says that a closed community undermines the whole ethos of Web 2.0 networks that live and die by information exchange. He likens the venture to trying to wash yourself without getting wet. It's not a highly original saying (in German), but one I'm fond of. I couldn't agree more.

What do the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and Apache have in common? Basically, huge influence, a great deal of collaboration, and dependence on free work supplied by amateurs. In Apache's case this has created a huge degree of reliability, and in Wikipedia the more science-based topics are usually very authoritative, too. Even in the blog vs traditional media debate it's now widely recognized that the comment and response system and immunity to commercial pressures compensate for a relative lack of infrastructure. The news world has in fact reached a point of interdependency.

Now, a lot of the more authoritative blogs are done on a professional basis, but the ecosystem in which they operate is one in which amateur or semi-professional bloggers predominate. This "mixed economy" model is also the basis of the profit in the Open Source movement -- companies can use Open Source profitably by using part Open Source, part proprietary software.

So how does this mixed professional and amateur, commercial and free environment affect the way you conduct online PR and marketing?

1. It's important not to make too big a distinction between amateurs and professionals. Professional is not better, commercial is not more reliable, so hierarchical thinking of this kind can be counter-productive. Mutual respect is the watchword.

2. It's not all about money. The fact there is so much good discussion in blogs, that Wikipedia is now so reliable, and that the open source movement has produced so much reliable software proves that a lot can be done without money. But it can't be done without trustworthiness and reliable information. Web presence comes with being a provider of information - not a tit-for-tat process of buying favours but one of becoming a participator. The investment is time and energy.

So perhaps the model companies should use for such participation is Google's "We offer our engineers '20-percent time' so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about", but in this case the free time is for participation.

In a couple of pitches recently I had a problem getting prospects to really see what is meant by participation marketing. So, anticipating that this could be a common problem, I'm going to try in this post, and maybe afterwards I'll find it easier to explain!

When we talk about participation in an online conversation, some people feel they already do this by creating relationships with specialist journalists, sending news releases, and getting onto blogs published by mainstream news sites. But that is not the same thing at all. Participatory activities are fundamentally different. They're not a way of broadcasting your message, but of creating a presence. That demands a different mindset, in which dialogue has to be more spontaneous. Normally this is also a method that suits the longer term, not a substitute for news releases.

Participation requires a different idea of speed and scale, and this is where the benefit is hard to see at first, If relationships are initially with a few bloggers whose readership is orders of magnitude smaller than those of TechCrunch and Engadget, why should a limited "live presence" matter? The answer depends on how we see Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is not primarily about social networking - that's important for young people, but in some ways it has been over-hyped both because MySpace etc. are popular and because they showcase many Web 2.0 features. But the key for businesses is that browser and email are points of entry to lots of different applications and forms of communication (features that the Chrome browser in particular is pointed at). The attraction to business is functionality. In all kinds of businesses, people are spending an increasing amount of time, and engaging in an increasing range of activities.

As business activities move online, "live participation" become more valuable for three reasons.

1. Neutrality is highly valued

Vendor-neutral blogs are highly visible for search terms that are highly specific to them - and that does not just mean for Internet search, but for services like Google alerts, widely used to keep up to date with breaking news in all industry sectors. The well-known blogs are usually not talking about your subject and even when they are they will often approach it from a completely different point of view from yours. The "magic middle" blogs - with thousands rather than millions of readers - can be a powerful presence, because search engines give precedence to what they see as neutral content. Good posts on a new topic (together with comments sent to them) are likely to get referenced many times and stay high in search rankings for a long time, maybe years.

2. Conversation is a two-way process

Dialogue will really show you what works and what doesn't. Normally, when you talk to PR and advertising agencies, they take your message and convert it into a sales message. They may turn it this way and that first, but they are unlikely to really challenge your information. When you are in a conversation where no-one gets a financial benefit, sales messages don't work, and you have to be more objective and informative. As that kind of communication acquires added value, you will find out how to make it work for you online. How else are you going to do that?

3. Advocacy multiplies your efforts

When you develop relationships with people who are strongly interested in you, those people will often turn into advocates. If they like you and think you provide a genuinely useful service, they will be happy to help you promote it by providing links to your website and other offerings. That is particularly true if you can help them with insight or expertise. Relationships of this kind can then create advocacy. That advocacy is priceless because you are not directly promoting it, or paying for it, and neither is your PR company. But it depends on risking a degree of directness and openness.

It's not surprising that marketing on the web has an American voice. After all, marketing was more or less invented in America, the best books on advertising and copywriting

have been written by Americans, and the best recent web marketing manual comes from David Meerman Scott, also an American. We are all speaking the same language now - English of course, but to an increasing extent English that he is shaped by the medium in which it is written, the webpage.

But the modern way of PR on the web goes further. It is not only that US marketing English is more direct, active and compelling than its UK counterpart, but now the medium itself. Americans are known to be in general more direct and less formal. This has been remarked on for at least a century. A couple of years ago, I read Anthony Trollope's North America, an account published in 1862, based on Trollope's a six-month tour of the region. Though not a great book, it is an interesting one, as Trollope was a very keen observer. One of his repeated observations is that every American he met felt equal to anyone, had a sense of ownership of the land on which he stood, and prized the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution, including, of course, freedom of speech. Where an Englishman - unless upper class or highly educated - would have felt in a position of inferiority, the Americans Trollope met, irrespective of wealth or class, felt inferior to no-one, with every bit as much right as the next person to state their opinion.

Nowadays, in a culture increasingly dominated by social networking and the blog, the American way has won. Where Europeans might feel that if everybody can say their piece about something, what will emerge is the lowest common denominator, American culture has none of this snobbishness or reserve, and celebrates the survival of the fittest. And in the largely meritocratic world of the blog, that attitude is right.

It is not equality and freedom, though, that have shaped the web, and that respond to an American approach to communication: social media also reflect the the way Americans interact. In five minutes of meeting an American, he or she will typically have elicited the main facts about you, and have got a good idea of what you are up to. In England, to take an extreme contrast, your eye colour, accent and maybe shoe size will have been noted, and the main facts about the recent weather firmly established.

So do we have to be American, now? As a Brit, I am not sure I want to be, or can be one, as it would probably mean pretending to be someone I'm not. But being inspired by a few aspects of the "American character" - speaking freely, being open, direct and communicative, and avoiding intellectual snobbery - is essential if Europeans are really to "get" the web!

Robin Goad, writing for Hitwise Intelligence, reports that UK Blog traffic has reached an all time high over the last three years. In the meantime, web news media have also done well, gathering more actual users, but starting from a higher baseline. I am a bit sceptical about Goad's claims that "blogs are catching up", because you can't simply compare percentages, as you can see below in Hitwise's own graph.



Interestingly, the Guardian newspaper and the BBC have two of the most popular blogs - both of them have impressed me by being entertaining and keeping clear of the editorial line of the main site, something which I think is essential for such blogs, but which many don't quite manage.