Since quitting journalism to join the murky world of public relations, I’ve been amazed to see just how badly the PR industry is tying itself up in knots trying to figure out how to deal with bloggers. Even today a lot of PR people seem to be completely baffled by what I thought would be relatively straightforward issues:
- What exactly is a blog, how is it different from any other content based website?
- What’s the difference between bloggers and journalists?
- How are we supposed to engage with bloggers?
These can be very complex questions, but they don’t need to be. For a start the word ‘blog’ is incredibly broad, and can be used to describe literally any site that runs on a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, etc. But to lump millions of different websites together simply because they happen to use a similar type of content management software, as some PRs have a tendency to do, is painfully stupid.
You wouldn’t put The Times and the local school newsletter on the same media list just because they both happen to be printed on paper. But because of this tendency to think of all blogs as equal, a lot of PRs still have a clichéd mental image of bloggers as greasy loners posting bitter tirades which nobody reads, which is a pretty moronic outlook when you consider the Technorati Top 100 blog list is littered with highly influential and professional blogs.
This brings me onto my next point – while some journalists, and possibly even bloggers, may not agree with this sentiment, from the perspective of the PR industry there is no real difference between the two. Somebody who writes for a professional, high quality blog is essentially doing the same kind of job as somebody who writes for a print newspaper or magazine. They are both influencers, they both have an audience, and ultimately that’s what really matters as far as PR is concerned.
As blogs and conventional publishers both branch out into areas like web based video and podcasts, it’s getting increasingly difficult to clearly delineate them. It’s no longer about whether you’re a blog, a newspaper or even a TV network, it’s about creating media brands and delivering strong content through a range of channels.
This is why I think it’s pointless to try and differentiate between bloggers and journalists at all. Instead, PRs should simply focus on identifying the influencers which are most relevant to their clients’ objectives, regardless of which channels those influencers choose to deliver their content.
However, there are likely to be obstacles to this approach for many organisations:
- PRs like to have nice clear metrics to measure influence, those metrics are well established in convention media but measuring the influence of blogs is much more difficult
- There can be political issues when different individuals/departments/agencies disagree over who should take ownership of relationships with bloggers, which invariably boil down to arguments about how blogs should be classified
These aren’t unsolvable problems, but they’re the kind of things that can really throw a spanner in the works if the will or creativity required to overcome them is in short supply. But there’s significant competitive advantage to be gained here – so either you figure out how to do it, or sit around and wait for your competitors to get there first.
(Er… I know I kind of skipped out on the ‘how do we engage with bloggers’ question, but I noticed this post was dragging on a bit, so I’ll leave that for another article.)