Day: January 27, 2003

XPRL.org the organization established to propose a common XML standard for the Public Relations profession has appointed a new chairperson, Alison Clark.

Alison, based in the UK, is a self-employed public relations consultant who previously held a variety of roles with Edelman, Wessex Water and Shandwick.

For anyone not aware of XPRL.org I recommend a visit to their website. It promises a new opportunity for standardizing the various documents we use in the PR process from press releases to clippings.

As we all know just because something is easier it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s better. For example. It’s certainly easier to watch a football game on TV, it’s cheaper, the toilets are close-by, you have the benefit of expert opinion and have the best views of the action. But you know it’s still far superior to experience the atmosphere youself, to be in the stadium.

The same can be said of e-mail. It has many positive attributes. It’s fast, easy to use and can provide a rich source of information with links, attachments etc. It also can help us be more productive.

However on the flip side it also has many negative attributes. We are overwhelmed with the volume of information we get on e-mail, it promotes laziness where people manage by e-mail rather than talking with others and in many cases people use e-mail in place of good working practices.

But for Public Relations practitioners one of the major problems with e-mail is that is can be shared around the globe in seconds.

Organizations honed good human resources techniques for many years, are we ready to throw them all out in favor of e-mail?

The answer should be no.

There are of course circumstances when you must communicate over e-mail. However you should always write it with the assumption that it will be distributed outside your firm.

The advent of sites such as Internal Memos.com mean any electronic communication must be carefully crafted and must take into account how it communicates to people outside the initial distribution list.

This was prompted by a story found by Richard Bailey in last Saturday’s UK Guardian.

The story tells how Julie Meyer, a prominent figure in the UK’s dotbomb period and a founder of the UK’s First Tuesday club for Internet entrepreneurs is facing issues around leaked e-mails about the ill-health of her latest venture.

The memo’s purport to represent communications between Ms. Meyer and her staff, though she adamantly denies their authenticity.

This raises serious PR issues. It’s one thing to have an internal memo leaked, but what about a faked memo?