Are blogs changing PR?

An interview carried by iMedia Connection – ‘Steve Rubel on how blogs are changing the face of PR’- brings forward a debate of the technical possibilities versus their relevance to the target market and the interest, uptake and commitment of clients to participate. The figures seem compelling. According to emarketer "Once a haven for techies, there are now blogs for everything from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae. By 2012, more than 145 million people - or 67% of the US Internet population - will be reading blogs at least once per month." 

They reckon 12% of US internet users, some 25 million write blogs. Surprisingly more than 100 million internet users, more than 50% are also blog readers. Big numbers then. Consider now some unofficial statistics from our own research in PR activity in the UK industrial market. Whilst the most active portal web sites carry news free of charge and archive thousands of stories, a sampling revealed that the vast majority were generated by relatively few companies or their PR agencies. The larger group of companies submitted very few stories. Some just one token story before presumably losing interest or running out of news. 

Talking to other PR people confirmed that news output from their clients was hardly prolific. Most needed quite a good portfolio of clients to make their PR business work. In our experience many clients don’t even think they have any news and a key task of a PR professional is teasing out stories in the first place. Then few have any people in-house that can write anything about their business sufficient to interest and editor, let alone a reader. 

But blogs demand a far bigger commitment by company personnel as there is both an immediacy and inside knowledge that the traditional PR practitioners will find difficult to embrace. For example not just getting the story, but getting client approval introduces a delaying factor. The blog is more of a personal view and works against the secrecy culture many clients have. 

Only recently a PR professional was lamenting a decision by a client to stop all case studies and third party endorsement stories as they did not want their competitors to know. We all have clients like that – great stories are blocked because the credibility associated with their blue chip customer cannot be mentioned. So the challenge is getting not only the commitment to write a blog, even if ghost written by an agency but also the openness to actually reveal the sort of compelling inside news content people want to read.