Blogger Corporate Relations
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James Joyner | Wednesday, March 22, 2006 |
Steve Bainbridge passes on word that Edelman* and Intelliseek have produced an interesting report, “Trust “MEdia” - How Real People Are Finally Being Heard - The 1.0 Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers & Company Stakeholders” [PDF]. From the executive summary:
Bloggers are speaking and being heard in real time, and only recently has the marketing community begun to grasp bloggers’ impact on brands, business and issues. Because of their speed, bloggers can and do alter the volume and tone of any conversation. Gone are the days of waiting months to get reliable feedback on an initiative. The new reality is this: any blog author with a passion for what you’re selling knows what you’re doing the minute you do it—and maybe even before. Bloggers comment immediately, and marketing and business professionals can quickly lose control of the conversation.
This white paper is an initial look at the dynamics of the Blogosphere. It’s intended to inform marketing and communications professionals about the who, what, where and how-to of blogging. If this paper has done justice to the subject of blogging, it
also should sound a huge wake-up call. Blogging is not a passing fad . . . but any brand, business or organization that fails to
grasp the fact may very well be.
Bainbridge analyzes the report’s key suggestions and agrees with them wholeheartedly. The key point, though, is one that is simultaneously intuitively obvious and yet almost universally ignored:
Bloggers write about only what’s interesting to them, so connect with the blog author by sharing information that his or her readers might appreciate. [Yep. I get lots of irrelevant stuff that would never get into the blog. So the sender often gets added to my spam file] Engage with the blogger on topics he or she has raised, thus establishing the relationship first. Don’t wear out your welcome. Make choices about who to contact, when to contact, and how frequently. [Political PR people are terrible at this. I get three or four canned press releases a day from some Congressional staffs. They too go into the spam file eventually.]
The bracketed/bolded comments are Bainbridge’s and I couldn’t agree more. (This is also true of other bloggers, by the way: Don’t send out a press release on every post on your blog to the top 100 blogs on the TTLB Ecosystem; that will just annoy about 99 people every email.) It’s more work to be selective, to be sure, but it’s infinitely more useful.
*My sources at Edelman, Marshall Manson and Mike Krempasky, let me down big time on this one.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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