Richard is head of Edelman PR, the third largest PR agency in the world. [Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, reporting to Richard.] Eric Norlin is interviewing him. (Robert Scoble bowed out because his mother is ill. Best wishes, Robert.)

[Josh Hallet has posted the audio of the this session.]

Q: Why are you pitching bloggers without reading them?

A: On behalf of the PR field, I apologize. There’s a better way. If not, bloggers will revolt.

Q: What’s different about Edelman?

A: We try to be a good example. We don’t always succeed.

Q: So, how would you pitch Robert Scoble?

A: You’d probably send him an email saying that you saw something he wrote, that you represent a company, would you like a sample without any strings attached? Would you like to get info about this company in the future? Permission based!

Q: Does the offer to provide product without strings scare companies?

A: Yes. Tech companies are scared the least. Heavy industry is worried the most. The mentality of corporations is the control of the message. We’re saying that if you want to be credible, you can’t control the message. E.g., GM Tahoe ads.

Q: If your product doesn’t suck, why do companies worry? It’s like 7th graders on the playground.

A: Marketers want to know they’re getting a certain audience at a certain frequency. The ad agencies have impressed on them for 30 years that you go from impressions to action. We — all of this in the room — deconstructing that model. You can’t have a topdown conversation where you buy a certain number of impressions. We’re saying it’s a horizontal conversation, peer to peer. It can turn bad for a company but that’s good because you can learn something. We you do media training you learn the message triangle: Always come back to the three same messages. Kerry lost the debates because he was media trained while Bush came across as a regular guy. So, the message triangle is gone from Edelman’s lexicon. That you can only communicate three messages is baloney. It’s a great opportunity for PR if done properly. If it’s message triangles and top down and spin, we’ll be flushed down the toilet of history.

Q: Are the ad agencies getting this?

A: Somewhere between panic, fear and nerves. The ad agency world has a huge reservoir of people who know how to make 30 second films. They don’t have a model for making money in the new world. The best work being done in ads is being done by younger agencies that don’t have an installed capability of doing 30 second ads. The ad guys are terified. It’s ruining their revenue model. They should be at this conference, but they’re not.

Q: Who reads press releases these days?

A: I had a discussion with _____ [missed it] who said the press release needs reinvention. Add tags to the press release: This is the company description, this is the supporting quote. He said he doesn’t want our news judgment because PR companies don’t have news judgment.

Q: Plus every company is the leading provider of…

A: It’s a word that will go away.

Q: So what replaces press releases?

A: We’ll give a set of information with tags, so you’ll organize it the way you want. [Sounds like a microformat to me.]

Q: How does a PR agency deal with the fact that a 12 yr old in Australia can break news as quickly as John Markoff of the NY Times? (A Scoble question.)

A: You have to be listening to the voices, and not limited to those you’ve always thought of as your sources of news. Stories can start with those of little “authority” (in Technorati speak). Second, stories frequently start in the blogosphere; the PR agencies don’t generally understand that. The Dove Real Beauty campaign started when Gawker noticed. We’re working with Technorati on a system that will work across seven languages — PR agencies willl be able to watch seven languages, real time, for your clients.

Q: Are big clients up on all this?

A: It’s a challenge. We’re working with having our clients show bloggers their products in advance of launch.

Q: What about Wal-Mart? Did you pay bloggers? [This is not actually what the accusation was. The issue was that some bloggers used pro-Wal-Mart information from Edelman without attributing it to Edelman or Wal-Mart.]

A: No, we did not pay bloggers. We look for bloggers who are positively inclined toward Wal-Mart, our client. Then we try to establish a conversation with them. A guy from our DC office sent a message to bloggers identifying himself as a PR agent and asking whether the bloggers would like more information about what Wal-Mart is doing about health care, etc. That got misrepresented by the NY Times. But: We identified ourselves and our client, told them our interests, and asked if they wanted a conversation. We followed every rule of engagement. It’s our right and our responsibility to do precisely this.

Jeff: The NYT requested a standard of bloggers that the NYT doesn’t hold to. It wants bloggers to identify where their info came from.

Richard: It would have been better if the bloggers had atttributed that the info had come from us for Wal-Mart. We didn’t say “You must mention Wal-Mart’s name as the source.”

Jeff: Bloggers don’t know the rules. They need training.

Richard: We will tell bloggers that they should mention the source.

Eric: What will PR look like in 5 years?

A: PR involved earlier on in the product life cycle: We’ll be a means by which a company can reach out to bloggers to affect prod development. Deconstructed press release. A more robust role in the corporate suite. I don’t see PR as being disintermediated. David Weinberger [hey, that’s me!] thinks PR gets in the way; no one wants to talk to the PR person. I think we should want the flak. We are indeed agents in that we represent our clients. I don’t see that PR has to be a negative connotation, which it currently has. We have to be about truth, listening, learning, and telling the corporation stuff it doesn’t want to hear. Five years from now, I hope PR people have the bvalls to say what they know. We need to give clients good advice. (We have thirty people blogging at Edelman. You learn by falling on your face.)

Q: What’s the retraining process at Edelman like?

A: It’s not easy. We have 30 people blogging. We probably have 15-20% who are regularly in touch with bloggers. That’s pathetic. I have to be tougher about it.

Q: (Audience) A blogger got sued by an ad agency, who then dropped the suit. Is it a good idea to sue bloggers.

A: No.

Q: Are you modeling the topology of the blogosphere?

A: There isn’t a model yet.

Q: Is PR getting smarter by looking at how groups interact, etc.

A: PR agencies are getting slammed for bad behavior, as they should.

Q: Who among the consumer brands get this best?

A: Unilever gets it.

Q: Who’s the best publisher – newspaper, magazine, etc.?

A: Washingtonpost.com is interesting.

Q: Do you advise clients to do executive blogs?

A: If the executive has an interesting voice.

Eric ends it by having a moment of silence for Robert Scoble and his mom. Amen. [Tags: pr richard_edelman syndicate]

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