Bear with the audio glitches in the first few minutes during my intro. Promise I’ll re-record things. Also, if you listen, you’ll get a preview of what the podcast is all about. I’ll also share the cleaned up version with Tim Allik for the PRobecast.

Are you cutting off your audiences’ voices? If you don’t allow comments on your blog or news site, you are. The bigger question you might be asking is, why should I care?

Because your audience will find its voice, whether you want it or not, whether you facilitate it or not, whether you like what they have to say or not. So you can either empower them and help shape the conversation that arises, or ignore them, hoping they’ll just go away — which is precisely what they will do.

Case-in-point: I have been a fan of the Annals of Improbable Research since before they were even called that. I attend the Ig Nobel free talks as often as I can, and wrote about them frequently on my old website. Marc Abrahams is the editor of AIR.

I subscribe to the feed for Marc’s blog, in which, today, he called attention to a FOX News columnists’ usurpation of the term Ig Nobel in the title of a rant against 76 Obama-backing American Nobel laureates. Marc, who normally has a sense of humor, took Steven Milloy’s use of the term a little too personally, claiming that the “column discards the basic Ig Nobel notion of laughter and thought.”

I wanted to comment on this claim, but found nowhere to go. Marc’s AIR blog does not allow comments, nor—not surprisingly mind you—does the Fox web site which hosted the column. So I’ll post my thoughts here.

Mr. Abrahams, your blog post “discards the basic Ig Nobel notion of laughter and thought.” Do you feel like you need to pass the Kleenex test and defend your brand? Fine, do so, and tell us that’s the reason. But if you’re seriously offended at anything FOX News puts out, then you need to get out more often.

To both Mr. Abrahams and the webmasters over at FOXNews.com: Keep your audience on your site! Increase stickiness. Reduce churn. Do what both the New York Times and Reader’s Digest do and turn your comments on.

By now, well more than one third of American newspapers allow reader comments. You should too. Read this article by Mark Glaser if you’re not convinced—an article, by the way, which I can comment on.

Photo courtesy of Meredith Farmer and Flickr.

I am very much enjoying Paul Gillin’s new book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing”. I’ll write a full review shortly, but I was inspired by the leadoff quote in chapter one, from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble:

The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.

Being a science nerd, I was struck by the similarities of this to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal, which essentially states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you can know its momentum.

Media training has been part of my job for about 8 years now, and boy has it changed. Anybody who’s still trying to sell the control paradigm is selling snake oil. Even old school PR master Apple can’t keep the genie in the bottle when it comes to secret projects and bad news (though the news has been good lately).

Here’s what I wrote way back in 2006 while at Topaz (emphasis mine):

It’s clear that companies are learning to give up control. Our media training slides, for instance, don’t talk about controlling the conversation any more. Richard Edelman stressed this issue of control at the last Syndicate show, and most PR agencies, if they haven’t fully embraced social media, are definitely talking about blogs and how they change the corporate conversation. A few of them are taking a stab at podcasting and even video.

Those who remain staunch supporters of the old “command and control” model of PR will ultimately either adapt or die. Forget “disruptive technology:” In astronomical/geological terms, social media is what you would call an ELE (Extinction-Level Event, pronounced “Ellie”).

I used to think that there was room for tradition. But the more I work in social media, the more I see all media heading in this direction. Yes there’s still plenty of room for good media training and good messaging. But if you don’t prepare your company or your clients for this, it will be your loss–look out for that fireball.

Folks, as Paul Gillin so deftly states in his opening chapter, bad news isn’t always bad news (emphasis his):

Negative feedback isn’t necessarily bad. We know that criticism is more useful than praise. It helps us to understand our shortcomings and make our products and business better. If customers are willing to offer you free advice, why would you not want to listen? If negativity exists, wouldn’t you rather find out now than wait until it turns up in The Wall Street Journal?