UK focus on blogs from PR Week

PR Week UK published a feature on blogs in this week’s edition of the PR industry’s magazine, out today. It’s the first real focus on the medium in the UK from a PR perspective.

Entitled Blogs cast a shadow, the feature should be a big help in raising awareness of blogs as a business communication channel among the UK PR community – a community that’s sorely in need of some awareness-raising.

Snippets:

23,000 new blog sites are created every day. Today, if people are unhappy about you or a client’s product, they will not just tell their friends, they will tell the world.

Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers: "PROs must realise more consumers find a company through Google than going straight to its homepage, and that’s where they will see blogs mentioning that company first."

There are pitfalls to corporate blogging. Mazda [USA] might have done better sticking to traditional comms channels after it was derided in the blogosphere for using a blog in a viral campaign. The viral spot itself was the main content of the blog and it was thus dismissed as a hollow marketing exercise.

Fredrik Wacka: "Forget control. It’s gone. It’s not about controlling, it’s about participating. If people are talking about your products or services, join the conversation. That’s the only long-term option."

And from the magazine’s leader page (not online):

[…] The wider lesson for all guardians of company reputation is to join the conversation rather than bury their heads in the sand. Bloggers are not journalists. They do not check facts. And yet some have widespread influence and are read by journalists. Openness and engagement will gain the respect of the blogging community. Silence will only alienate it and threaten to turn a non-story into a crisis.

PR Week | Blogs cast a shadow

(Related: Shel and I discussed the PR Week feature yesterday in show #46 of The Hobson & Holtz Report. Discussion starts at 33:28.)