I was taken aback by an item in The Blog Herald that was inspired by an item in Stowe Boyd’s blog. Stowe wrote:

I think it is more likely that a role analogous to press relations will arise: blog relations. These folks will keep tabs on Blogpulse and Technorati, to see what is going down, but they will also maintain and active and on-going relationship with the major bloggers in their sector.

Matt Craven, who wrote the Blog Herald item, responds by noting that he is aware of several companies following this pattern. He cites one Fortune 500 company that sends its execs a daily intelligence report gleaned from Buzzmetrics, and another using several sources (Bloglines, PubSub, Technorati and Feedster) to monitor keywords, assembling the results into daily intelligence and “pulse” information.

All of which is great; I’ve been advising clients and audiences to start monitoring the blogosphere for a couple of years now. My question is whether blog monitoring needs to be a discrete function in the organization or whether blogs should simply be added to the monitoring mix. Public relations academics refer to “environmental scanning” as the gathering of intelligence about publics and environmental forces:

These activies are conceptually distinct from performance control feedback, program adjustment feedback, and organizational adaption feedback…These feedback loops are conceptual representations in an open-systems model of the three types of program evaluation that practitioners use to measure the preparation, implementation, and impact of public relations programs. Scanning research is different…Such research is exploratory in nature…The strategic function of scanning is early detection of emerging problems as well as quantification of existing or known problems in the environment.—Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management

In other words, companies that scan the entire environment and aggregate the results to make informed assessments will be far better off than those that compartmentalize their scanning—one person looking at blogs, another looking at media, another looking at activist groups and so on.

How organizations deal with the blogosphere needs to be thought through carefully; there are significant differences between blogger relations and media relations, as Stowe Boyd suggests. How we monitor, though, should be based on a holistic view of the world as it intersects with the organization. We should add blog monitoring to the mix, not create a new function that fails to reconcile the intelligence obtained from the blogosphere with that obtained from the multitude of other channels in which our organizations are fodder for conversation.