Public relations professionals have always wrestled with protecting and managing their clients' image. But blogs are forcing publicists to rethink their tactics for mitigating bad word-of-mouth.

John Bell, managing director of 360 Degree Digital Influence at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, answered some questions about how public relations experts can manage, and in some ways, prevent trash-talking by bloggers.

WSJ.com: Your title contains the term "Digital influence." That sounds so ineffable.

Mr. Bell: It's not meant to be a bunch of jargon. What we do in public relations [is study how] how influence is wielded. We're all influenced in more complex ways everyday.

[There has been a] shifting balance of trust [where] people are trusting word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer more than they are traditional media, marketing. People are relying much more on peer-to-peer recommendations than anything else.

And also [with] the explosion of technology, things are changing. The Internet is changing public relations overall. So that's what digital influence is and that's what my team focuses on.

WSJ.com: How does one manage or control digital influence?

Mr. Bell: The interesting thing about digital influence is that control is the wrong word. You can't really control everything. What we can do is getting get involved in the conversation. When we're [dealing with] bloggers for instance, our best strategy is to start to talk them as fellow bloggers. Many of us are bloggers, myself included.

[We should] be transparent about who we are and what our goals are. It sounds naïve on some levels, but our best strategy is to have an honest, authentic discussion with those people who are important to us on a particular issue or [for] a particular client.

WSJ.com: Some bloggers have been increasingly vocal about problems with products. At what point does chatter become bad PR?

Mr. Bell: A company who makes a product needs to understand whether there is a problem with their product. And there's a couple of simple ways to do that: One is to test your product ad nauseum. But none of that is foolproof. Another way is to aggressively listen to the users using the product. When there's a problem, you respond to it quickly.

This is anecdotal but I remember that [after] one release of a Microsoft operating system, there were a lot of bugs and patches and so on. And Microsoft was very good about being ever-present in the discussion. [Whenever] they saw [something] on a message board, they would then proactively respond or more often rather than not, quickly create the fix and make it available as quickly as possible. So they had a very good customer service response mechanism. Speed is of the essence here.

Full story continued at The Wall Street Journal Online.