Many corporate communication departments operate in a silo. They take instructions from above and perform environmental scans, and prepare communications to address needs coming from both directions. This model worked fine when all messages between a company and its publics were filtered through the communications department.

In the era of social computing, however, employees are in direct contact with customers (take a look at my previous post as an example: Microsoft developer Dean Hachamovich responded directly to my complaint about a glitch in IE7, and I’ll bet he didn’t clear it with PR first). Remaining blissfully unaware of the connections employees are making with audiences can have significant repercussions for PR departments.

For a case in point, look to Jon Udell’s blog post of of June 3 (which I just saw, thanks to a pointer from Andy Lark). Here, Udell recounts what happened after a developer at Google invited him to look at a new API. Udell told the developer he’d rather talk to someone about the GData API. The developer promised to have someone get in touch with him. What followed was a series of contacts with a PR department that had no clue about what was going on. When he explained he was responding to a contact with a developer, the communicator said, ““Can you also please contact the communications team rather than going to the product folks directly so we can make sure your inquiry is routed to the appropriate party and answered in a timely fashion?” Remember, Udell was contacted by the developer, not the other way around.

Then, to make matters worse, when Udell reiterated his interest in talking to someone about the GData API, the communicator said, “What does Gdata refer to? We don’t have a product called Gdata that I’m aware of…” 

By the time the PR folks at Google got back to Udell offering an interview—assuming he forward his questions first—Udell was disenchanted enough to pass. Google lost the opportunity for some coverage by Udell, an Information Week writer.

I don’t mean to pick on Google’s PR team. It’s a story I’ve seen repeated in dozens of companies where the communicators are so insulated from the rest of the company that they don’t know who’s talking to whom or what the company’s working on. Part of functioning in a PR role in the world of social media includes establishing processes for staying in touch so we can be prepared to address questions and issues as they arise.

Does anybody work for PR in a company where such processes have been established? I’d love to hear what those processes are and how they’re working.