I’m a few chapters into Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s blog booster “Naked Conversations” and I’d say it’s must reading for any PR person – and for the CEOs and marketing executives they work with.

While we’ve seen a major increase in the understanding and appreciation of blogs in business, there are still too many laggards as we’ve seen from our blog PR conversations with major tech companies in recent months. There’s the corporate PR person for a leading software company who told me that their company blog is handled by the R&D group – and she’s fine with focusing on just traditional media. And the internal customer communications pro for a major hardware vendor who says she wants nothing to do with blogs – they’ll just cause more trouble by giving nagging customers more visibility.

This reminds me of my first foray into “Web PR” years ago, with the agency I was with prior to launching Topaz Partners in 2001. Miller Communications (later Miller Shandwick and then part of Weber Shandwick) was an early player in the use of the Web for PR – but there were many very smart, very creative PR professionals who balked at adopting then emerging initiatives such as webcasts and online events. They eventually came around, but for many years this Web-based work was handled by a select few speciailists.

For many PR firms, that’s still the case – a team of online communications specialists is called on when there’s a need or opportunity to launch a blog or monitor online discussions. At Topaz Partners, we’re convinced that this approach is short-sighted – for our staff, for our clients and for our agency’s future. We believe every PR professional should become an expert in this area – just as we expect them to develop expertise in writing, traditional media relations and other aspects of public relations.

Topaz was an earlier blog believer (we launched our blog and our Buzz Media and Online Communications – or BMOC — services in 2004), and while we certainly have folks that have emerged as leaders on our staff, we prefer to think of these folks as evangelists rather than specialists. As we move forward with the next generation of our BMOC services, we’re placing a major emphasis on education – internal education aimed at helping our staff to better understand resources like blogs, RSS, wikis and podcasts and how to put these tools to work for our clients.

Over the past year, Topaz saw a major step forward in blog-awareness, but we expect much more adoption in the second half of 2006 — as the PR community develops more “buzz media experts” and as the wave in Naked Conversations continues to spread over corporate America.