It’s a word everyone uses, because everyone wants to be known as a team player.  At the same time, we in the PR industry need to make sure that we are each thought of as indispensible to our clients, so sometimes, perhaps there’s a bit of jockeying for position among those who are supposed to be working together.

And I suppose competition is always good.  I mean, show me a town with only one pizza place and I’ll show you a town with expensive, bad-tasting pizza.  Show me a town with two pizza places, and I’ll show you two successful business owners and thousands of satisfied customers.

But in this business, where our sole focus must be on client delight, there is no room for competition that impacts on our ability to collaborate.

I’ll give an example:

Ruder Finn Israel’s focus is international media relations.  That means that whenever we have an opportunity to work on a project that has both domestic and international elements to it, we work with partners.  That’s fine with us, especially considering the rather small universe of domestic Israeli media.

For the most part, we work quite nicely with domestic-focused firms, but we did have one ocassion recently where we began to work with a client and were surprised to see a competitor (domestic-focused) in the room during our kick-off meeting with this client.  I’ll call him ”Joe,” for the purpose of the story, although that is not his real name.

Anyway, he walked into the room and I said, “Hey, Joe, what are you doing here?”

He said, “I’m your new boss.  I work with this organization and they wanted me to be here to make sure you guys are doing things right.”

Now, to make a long story short, we have not seen any sign of Joe since that meeting, and from the sounds of things, this particular client only works with him because he’s cheap and because they don’t really depend on him for the high-level strategic stuff, but his referring to himself as our ”boss” did not make for a collaborative working atmosphere.

And that is an important point as well.  One’s expectations, in terms of collaboration, shouldn’t be too lofty.  Collaboration doesn’t mean that the all agencies want to go out of their way to make the other guy look good.  It means that all realize success will only come if the client is happy.

So what do we do about this problem?

What do we do when our clients go crazy about a negative Blog post, but dismiss a positive one we’ve worked hard to secure because, after all, it is just a Blog?

What do we do when a Blog gets the facts wrong but doesn’t feel a professional obligation to correct them because, after all, it is just a Blog?

And finally, what do we do when a Blog posts something that then is one of the top ten results in a Google search, thereby potentially hurting the subject of the post?

The answer: We do nothing … and everything.

We do nothing means that this is a new media format and we have to deal with the fact that it plays by different rules (or no rules).  And when there are no rules, there is really nothing you can do to turn things in your favor consistently.

But we also must do everything.  We must do everything in our power to run our businesses and organizations properly and with super-high standards.

That means we must make sure our products work and our customers are served well.  It means we must run our organizations cleanly, and in a way that will not call into question the money we are spending on operating those organizations.

That means that the Israeli catch-phrase of “Yihiyeh B’seder” (“it will be alright”) must go out the window, because Blogs are making sure that it won’t be alright.

And, by all means, we all must understand that honesty, integrity and truth must now rule.  Because if there is one rule by which the Bloggers play, it is that lying will not be tolerated.

This is the world we live in.  In most ways, it is much more complex than the early days of my career, when there was no Internet, e-mail, email, cell phone nor Windows.

But in one very important way, our world is much simpler:

Take one bad step, and it costs you dearly in the blogosphere.  Do the right thing, and, well, our Blogger friends might still slam you … but at least you will be able to look in the mirror.

And if I can sum up the blogosphere simply, it would be just that.  It’s a mirror. For the world.  For industry.  And for each of us to gaze at and ask: Do we like what we see?

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