sign up now!

submit an article

give feedback

This Blog’s For You

By Jay Krall and Heidi Sullivan
Cision

It’s widely known that blogs present huge opportunities for PR and marketing professionals to converse and interact with the public. But how to go about starting that conversation, and how to measure its impact once it’s underway, can be confusing. In truth, the fundamentals of working with bloggers are the same as those of working with traditional media outlets: respect their schedules, take time to read their material to learn their interests; and only contact them if and when they want to be contacted.

What’s perhaps more important than the pitch itself is choosing the right blog to pitch. With hundreds of thousands of blogs on the Web, it is difficult to find the blogs that will be beneficial to you and your campaign. One of the great benefits of pitching blogs is finding niche blogs geared directly toward the type of product you're pitching. Pitching blogs offers the ability to hone in on an audience that is acutely interested in a very specialized topic, such as a single product or a specific interest. Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine and a prolific blogger, says “I’ve got blogs whose target audience is 100 people—the right 100 people.” [i] Cision’s research products offer blog listings on many of these niche topics and this is a great place to start in determining which blogs to target for a particular PR campaign.

A few examples of popular blogs that stick strictly to one topic:

• MoboDojo - covers mobile phones and smart phones
• Great Green Shoes – covers environmentally friendly footwear
• CNET's Kitchen Gadgets – coves kitchen gadgets
• The Rolling Rains Report - covers travel for people with disabilities

Once you have your list of blogs to pitch, some research is required. Reading recent posts to determine the blog’s tone, specific coverage area and type of news that they report on is crucial. While many bloggers, particularly those focused on trade sectors, do accept press releases, most bloggers are more likely to respond to a PR professional who engages in a conversation with them. Remember, even more than traditional media contacts, bloggers are blogging about topics that they are passionate about. Instead of just sending a press release, leave insightful comments or questions about a post you find interesting or send an e-mail that discusses larger industry trends.  

The other benefit to engaging in these conversations is that the blogosphere offers a more immediate and direct interaction with consumers than traditional media. Consumers not only read blogs, but comment on them and link to them. Developing relationships with the key communities in your industry will help to increase your client or product’s visibility.

So you discover that a blog has made mention of your product or service. Will anyone see it? How will you know? A blog’s visibility can be measured in a great many ways beyond traditional Web metrics such as Unique Visitors per Month. A few of those ways include:

• Links. Are other bloggers linking to and discussing the blog’s content? While a number of services track statistics on how often a particular blog is cited by others, discovering whether a mention of your product or service on a blog is generating buzz can be done with a simple Web search for key phrases from the post. Depending on your goals, just two or three links to the post might be considered successful in making an impression on the right audience; only about 50 blogs on the Web today average more than 20 citations elsewhere per day.

• Unique Visitors, RSS and E-mail Subscribers. Some blogs provide data on their main page or an About Us page about how many visitors and subscribers they have. 

• Post Frequency. Once you’ve determined via another method that a blog is fairly popular, the frequency of posts is a good way to determine how often a blog’s followers may be visiting the blog. Frequency of posts should not be used as a primary parameter, as it’s always possible that a dedicated blogger is just shouting into the void with little or no audience. However, there is a strong correlation between how frequently a blogger posts and the size of the blog’s audience. Among the top 200 blogs on the Web, ranked by Unique Visitors per Month, those that average at least three posts per day have two and a half times as many visitors as those that post less frequently.

• Social Networks and Bookmarking Utilities. Many blogs include links to a variety of social tools for bloggers. Yahoo’s MyBlogLog allows users to join a community of fans of a particular blog. The blog Lifehacker has more than 6,500 community members on MyBlogLog. Bookmarking utilities such as Del.icio.us (also owned by Yahoo) and Digg allow users to bookmark blog posts and share their bookmarks with each other. These sites then list the blogosphere’s most popular posts. A blog post can quickly gain steam this way; the most popular posts on Digg usually receive several thousand bookmarks (or “diggs”) within 24 hours of being posted. It can also help to search social networks such as Facebook for mention of a particular blog.  

There are many opportunities for PR professionals to utilize blogs to both promote a product or service and gauge reaction. The key lies in understanding that blogs are less a singular movement or phenomenon than a loosely affiliated group of small communities, each devoted to a narrow set of interests or topics. Honing in on the right community can be the beginning of a great conversation with both professionals and consumers.