Blogs & PR

 

If you consider the amazing volume and growth rate of blogs – there are currently 112 million being tracked by blog monitor Technorati.com and the number has been doubling every six months – it’s hard to believe that starting your own can have any sort of impact.

Yet importantly it’s not just the volume of blogs that’s growing but their influence. The Observer this month published an article – ‘The World’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs’ – which showed how blogs like The Huffington Post and British entrepreneur Nick Denton’s Gawker.com have not only become incredibly influential in their fields but also, in the case of Gawker, become viable multi-million pound publishing businesses.

For my clients, the value of blogging comes from the opportunity to publish their views, demonstrate their expertise and interact with the marketplace on behalf of their companies with a frequency that just wasn’t possible before. It also helps build individual profiles so that the next time you’re trying to sell in your client for an opinion piece and the editor says ‘who he/she?’ you can demonstrate their writing credentials.

So a very handy PR channel and a credible one (with a few high profile exceptions). There is however one big proviso – an estimated four out of five blogs end up dormant. So the biggest challenge of PR in the blogosphere could be simply motivating your clients to keep posting – a challenge that I now also appear to have set myself. The words ‘petard’ and ‘hoisted’ spring to mind.

Ross Furlong