One interesting consideration occurs to me while I'm here at the Microsoft Worldwide PR Summit.

During the week there's been alot of discussion about how we as PR practitioners interact with and manage, new and emerging channels for distributing news and exerting influence. Primarily the discussion has been around blogging.

Its an area where Microsoft can feel pretty good about its track record. They have a few star bloggers on board and some 3000 or so bloggers among their employees. Innovations like Channel 9 have shown the human face inside the Redmond bunker. Other pockets of excellence have been shown in Italy and Latin America. But by no means do they profess to have all the answers. The general tone is, its great to experiment - but do it carefully and with your eyes wide open. Which is appropriate advice when you are responsible for one of the world's most respected and valuable brands.

The interesting thought is one that holds true for any corporate PR operation trying to manage its newsflow on a global basis in a Web 2.0 world. Its about the internal organizational and operational issues that get thrown up.

In the old world, PR managers in subsidiaries always needed to get press releases early to translate them, pre-brief journalists and generally get best value from the ammunition handed down to them. Even today in any large corporate PR operation, there remains room for friction between the PR teams at the centre holding materials close to their chests until the last minute, then firing releases out expecting instant responsiveness and local outreach, ignoring the fact that timezones mean some of the recipients are asleep, and the short lead time will limit their ability to get maximum value from any announcement. Its a firedrill that's familiar to all PRs.

So how do you manage in a Web 2.0 world? What happens when someone back in the product development team decides the tactics for the big announcement will be a managed leak into a key blogging community in the expectation that it'll get picked up by mainstream media. It might generate a cool case study but where that leave your global PR managers? In most cases scrambling to catch up. Does it lead to a few great headlines at the expense of a more planned approach and, maybe, at the cost of headlines in every country of the world? And will it devalue the currency of those PR Managers with their local media, so when you need them to damp down a real fire, they have no trust or credibility to draw upon?

If its tough for corporate PR operations to manage processes today, when news distribution is a pretty linear path of cascading news releases through the organization, how equipped are they to understand new processes and the sort of PR infrastructure necessary to co-ordinate, manage and monitor newsflow in a Web 2.0 world?

We are already building realtime news monitoring and management tools to better equip clients in tracking and analysing the impacts of these strategies. As yet no-one has asked us to help them look more deeply at their internal processes, systems and infrastructure. I don't think many people see the need, yet. I suspect they soon will.