I’ve been considering advising a client to start a blog.  An “official” blog that fully discloses who’s writing and paying for it.

I turned to a blogger I know, who has been in the sphere for a while, to see what he thought about the idea and whether he saw a negative aspect to doing this that I might not have considered.

I think I got some really good feedback.

I was advised that “official” blogs tend to be regarded with disdain in the blogosphere because part of the attraction of blogs is that they’re informal and honest.  “Official” blogs are generally neither – they can’t be informal for legal reasons and they can’t be completely honest because that’s not the purpose of the blog.

The blogger felt that what blogs/bloggers do best (at this point in their evolution) is call “bullshit” when they see it.  An “official” blog begs to be ridiculed most of the time.

I was referred to the last Canadian federal election campaign to see what was written about the campaign blogs for each party and each candidate – almost uniformly negative.

He suggested that if I/my client was going to run a blog, we’d need to somehow overcome that.  Full disclosure in the header or top sidebar (who’s writing it, who pays the bills, the objective of the blog, etc.) might help.

He also suggested talking about the bad as well as the good, and maybe even having an area for open comments where those who disagree could engage in the debate. 

He thought we’d win over more people by winning an argument with a dissenter on the blog than by putting out one-sided spin.

If we go ahead, we’ll being doing so with this insight in mind.

For more than a year, our firm, Thornley Fallis and 76design, has invested heavily in social media because we see it as an important new communications medium.

Currently, our team has five blogs (ProPR, PRGirlz, Shift+Control, StudentPR and Uninstalled) as well as InsidePR, a weekly podcast.� All of which have their posts aggregated on the Thornley Fallis website.

We want to understand social media thoroughly and be a leader in the area in order to properly advise our clients on how they can use it to enhance their internal and/or external communications programs.

For several months now, I’ve been following a variety of blogs and podcasts, and frequently leave comments on topics that I find interesting or have a point of view on.

Also, we regularly pitch bloggers on behalf of clients (just as we do traditional media) with news and stories that we think would be of interest to them – based the focus of their blog.

Lastly, we’ve already helped several clients implement social media projects.

It was time to get in the game ourselves.

I am co-authoring this blog with two of my colleagues at Thornley Fallis, Stephen Heckbert and LeeEllen Carroll.� We’ve named it CapitalPR because we are public relations professionals practicing in Ottawa, Ontario – Canada’s capital city.

This blog is a place for us to comment and share our thoughts and ideas on public relations, communications, marketing, government, media and other topics that we are interested in.

As part of doing this, we hope our blog will be a place for clients, potential clients, industry colleagues, potential recruits and others to interact with us and learn about our firm and the people that work here.