Archive for January 22nd, 2009
PR and Bloggers Can Live Together January 22nd, 2009
Last nights PR and Blogger meet up in Edelmans offices passed off with any physical harm to any of the attendees. Billed as collision course the atmosphere was pretty friendly and more curious than frictional. Overall some interesting points:
- most bloggers post on their own time and approaching them in a insolicited fashion is akin to stopping a random punter on the street and sticking a press release in their face.
- most bloggers are open to approaches that show you undertand their blog, what you are offering is relevant, is fairly informal and covering anything from attending events, angles on stories, reviews of new stuff, interesting videos. The approach by BTs to the Young Scientist and giving free tickets was pointed out as positive.
- Bloggers are constantly in touch with each other and will frequently IM each other when they get approaches from PR companies especially if offering exclusives.
- No bloggers reported making money from their blogs and are fuel/energised by passion for the topic.
- Blogger relations takes more time and the PR industry has a struggle to convince clients to allocate resources so it does not end up being a bloggers email address getting added to a media distribution list.
- Journalists who are also bloggers view mails and to their media email account very differently to their blogger email account.
- Twitter offers great potential for monitoring (ORM), possible relevant story seeding and early heads up on industry developments.
- Bloggers like to have previews of up and coming stuff so they can debate it before it hits main stream media.
- Bloggers spend vast amounts of time in preparing their posts and take personal pride in them. Poor blogs will just not get read.
- There is a general nervousness in approaching blogger as mistakes can become highly personal and visible.
- Links to stories/press releases/photos plus personal commentary are more welcome than cut and paste press releases.
- PR community doing a poor job with clients in convincing them of the merits of PR and blogger relations in general.
- PR people should blog more so that they can understand the medium and utilise the Irish press release service.
Overall is was a positive event and these type face to face encounters help to over the suspicion and mistrust between the two groups.
Interesting to see how the next one goes which is planned for February.
Tags: blogger event, blogger relations, PR, Public Relations
Posted in Blogging, ORM, Online PR, Twitter | Comments (8)