Last week the news that Google was rolling out a feature that allowed sources to comment spurred this post from me, as well as a ton of other responses from around the blogosphere, much of it pretty breathless about what a cool feature it was, and some of it more mixed. Today, PR Week has a story up on the topic, quoting me, among others.

I was glad to participate in the PR Week article, because my initial reaction to the news was pretty short and very negative -- as always, there is more nuance that can be found. In my conversation with Aarti Shah, I made the following points:

One, the idea feels very unwieldy and unworkable -- who decides who is a participant and why? How do you automate? How do you verify identity? Who decides on if a company/individual should be able to comment? After all, in any story there are people who are quoted and those who participate but don't end up being quoted -- how does Google parse this? (Hint: algorithms aren't going to cut it) 

Two, PR already has the ability to do much of this already -- there are comments on news sites and blogs now, even back in the dark ages before the Web and blogs we could do op/eds and letters to the editor.

Three, there are really two models at play here -- the Wikipedia model which says that the key players in a an article CAN'T contribute because they are intrinsically biased, and this model that said that the ONLY people who could participate were the participants. In my view, the better model is somewhere inbetweeen and that's where we'll end up.

Four, the reaction to the beta itself says a lot about the media right now -- no way does the product justify this hype.

Finally, the big lesson for PR is that we need to be looking at ALL the tools and ALL the ways people receive information, and find ways to have our clients voice there, via comments, blogs, traditional PR etc. There is no single silver bullet to solve communications problems, as always the trick is having the right communication method for the right audiences.

As an aside, my blog (or any blog) provides exactly the same capability for rapid and accurate commenting on a news story that Google is trying to bring to market.

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