RSC Partners, Inc.

In the last six months, Scott and I have met with dozens of “old economy” companies (e.g., manufacturers, energy companies, pharmas, health care providers, etc.) to talk about the growing influence of the blogosphere and the need for them to assimilate new media into their communications efforts.

Thankfully, many of these meetings have been well received and RSC Partners is an unqualified success, but an alarming number of these encounters have followed a now familiar pattern: polite nods, followed by glassy-eyed stares, capped by a litany of reasons why a blog just isn’t a good fit for the organization (“institutional culture,” “bureaucratic resistance within management,” etc.)

The irony, of course, is that these are the companies that a need a blog the most– companies that absolutely cannot get equal time or fair treatment in the mainstream media. We offer them a soap box from which to tell their story– unfiltered, unedited, and un-rebutted–and they recoil in horror!

The companies that “get it” have either launched blogs or have plans to do so. The ones that don’t will find it harder and harder to ignore the fact that the tremendous influence blogs already enjoy is quickly being reinforced by their widespread acceptance as a journalistic medium.

The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal (the “Bible” for old economy companies) features not one, but two articles about the power of blogs and the new media, with a third article in the B Section (links below). Yesterday, newspapers across the country ran high profile stories about political luminaries who traveled to Las Vegas this weekend to Markos Zuniga’s blogger conference, just to pay homage.

One savvy public affairs executive recently told me that she was in no hurry to launch a blog because the “window of opportunity” will remain open indefinitely. While I commended her for realizing that blogs are here to stay, I countered with the disarmingly simple question: “If the New York Times offered you 650 words for an op-ed placement this Sunday, would you take it or would you wait until the timing was more convenient?”

At that moment, I saw it in her eyes– the light bulb went on. Throughout corporate America, more and more light bulbs are going on, slowly but surely, as the old economy meets the new media– Fiat Lux.

Blogger Hits Home By Urging Boycott of Chinese Property [Wall Street Journal]

Local Stateions Struggle to adapt As Web Grabs, Viewers, Revenue [Wall Street Journal]

Noted Microsoft Blogger, Scoble, to Join a Pod-Casting Start-Up [Wall Street Journal]