What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [119]
PR people are trying to use the tools of web 2.0, Google, search, and social media to update their practices. Many of them blog—see, for example, Richard Edelman, head of the eponymous PR firm, and his web 2.0 guy, Steve Rubel, who blogs, Twitters, and joins in any new digital fad that comes round the corner so he can educate clients about them. PR people use these tools to keep track of what is being said about their clients and to join in those conversations. They have also been burned. In 2006, two bloggers wrote about their cross-country RV tour of Wal-Marts, where they met no end of allegedly happy employees. Revealed to have been arranged by Edelman and paid for by the front organization Working Families for Wal-Mart, the tour turned out to be an old-fashioned PR stunt updated only with the use of blogs. Edelman fell on his sword in a blog post: “I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s.” Case in point: PR people are not, and likely cannot be, transparent. They have clients.
But it should be the job of PR advisers to convince clients that it is in their interest to be transparent and honest now that obfuscations and lies can be exposed so easily online. That is PR turned upside-down: Rather than representing and spinning the client to the world, they remind the client that the world is watching. They can also help companies fulfill their new role in the ecology of information online. We expect companies to have sites, to share information, to be factual if not fully transparent. Openness is the best PR you can have. Still, because they only advise, PR people aren’t often in a position to change how a company is managed.
I’m sure lawyers and PR people—like real-estate agents—will be glad to tell me where I’m wrong and I welcome that discussion on my blog: Let’s have at it, and if there are ways to Googlify these trades, then congratulations. In the meantime, both fields need to watch out, for the tools of Google and the internet enable others to disintermediate, undercut, and expose them.
The law and its execution are aided by obfuscation. The internet can fix that. A small number of volunteers could, Wikipedia-like, publish simple, clear, and free explanations of laws and legal documents online. All it takes is one generous lawyer—not an oxymoron—to ruin the game for a thousand of them. I’ve seen a few such sites. They’re not very good yet—none worth recommending—but they’re a start.
Another trend that helps both lawyers and clients is the movement to open up laws and case law online, making them searchable and free. It is a scandal that the work of our own legislatures and courts is often hidden behind private pay walls. Westlaw and Lexis, the so-called Wexis duopoly, have turned our laws into their $6.5 billion industry. They add value by organizing the information, but others are now undercutting them. Forbes told the story of Fastcase, a start-up that uses algorithms instead of editors to index cases so it can reduce costs and lower fees to lawyers. Better yet, public.resource.org is fighting to get laws and regulations online for free. Patents are online now, and Google has made them searchable (go to google.com/patents and, for entertainment, look up pooper scooper—aka “Apparatus for the sanitary gathering and retention of animal waste for disposal” or “perpetual motion machine” or Google itself). Laws, regulations, and government documents are prime meat for Google’s disintermediation.
Sometimes lawyers are employed merely to intimidate