Things will be a bit quiet here until the weekend as I’m on the road. Meanwhile, take a look at the results of the Technorati/Edelman blog survey that was conducted late last month.
According to the two firms, Technorati contacted tens of thousands of active bloggers via email, blog posts and the networks of discussion and links those posts generated. The survey generated 821 responses during the week of 26 September.
In an email yesterday announcing the availability of the results, Edelman CEO Richard Edelman said:
The data is terrific – it’s very instructive and helps us improve our approach so that we can be credible sources of information to you and informed counsel to our clients. We’re actively sharing it across the PR industry and I plan to blog about the results tomorrow. Please feel free to blog about the study and your own interpretations of the results. I welcome your comments on my blog – http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/ – or via e-mail.
Related NevOn post:
The results of the survey are indeed very interesting! Initially, however, the survey left me wanting more — I wanted more specifics, wanted to know why. Looking over the free form results and reading Edelman’s post on his own blog proved to be very helpful in satisfying my curiosity.
I also enjoyed your related post, by the way, in which you detailed a few of the questions and explained how you would have liked to expand on them. It was interesting to look at the survey results, as a whole, and then read the perspective of someone who actually took the survey.
In reading the results, I thought it was particularly interesting that bloggers MOST trust other blogs as a source of information about a product. Hmm … I think that’s a pretty healthy indicator of the influence and value of blogs.
This research should be very useful as PR practitioners continue to recognize the importance of blogs. It’s good to identify the gap between what PR does now (and how they currently approach bloggers) and what is actually preferred by bloggers. As I noted in my comment on Edelman’s blog, the ideal objective of PR is to develop mutually beneficial relationships between and organization and all its publics. In this case, bloggers are the public … and we need to strive to do things their way.
I thought this remark of Edelman’s was especially significant: “We need to help companies enter the conversation, but they can only do that with respect, humility and honesty.”
Dissemination vs. Communication
Dissemination and communication: are they the same?
Heck no! Websters defines the two this way:
Dissemination – to spread throughout Communication – an act or instance of transmitting
Does the difference seem obvious? Hmm. Maybe n…