Blogs, Blogging, Bloggers

Once my media relations professor told me that blog will definitely be the new trend of social media since it holds tremendous potential in PR functions such as information sharing, issue framing, persuasion, etc. This blog is in response to the article by Michael Kent "Critical Analysis of Blogging in Public Relations." His opinions are interesting and thought-provoking.

Kent acknowledges that for PR professionals, blog is a great place to start in research as a tool for information gathering and environmental scanning. Every blog, especially blogs for information, business or academic use, is usually focusing on certain area or particular topics, thus each blog develops certain audiences around it. PR practitioners who want to understand the publics and public sentiments around certain topics, they'd better check blogs for information. Once some unanticipated issues arises, blog is also useful tools for issue management, like searching for reader sentiment, linking to useful information, etc. In addition, using blogs as a way to influence the audiences is probably most mentioned by PR professionals. Allowing or encouraging visitors to an organization's website to participate in how online news is framed is the biggest strengths of blogs. Many companies hire people to write for their product to frame the public opinions positively towards their products.

However, there are weaknesses of blogs, according to Kent. Communicative risks do exist in blogging, bloggers have two features: anonymous and informal. Bloggers, even act sometimes as opinion leaders, live in virtual world, this is the reality. And, bloggers sometimes cannot even be a representative of publics, because you will never know when a comment of an idea will become the next trend. Informal does not refer to every blogs and bloggers. There are many brilliant PR blogs that I follow during the whole simester. Bloggers behind are smart, wise and thoughtful, and in fact, they are still opinion leaders in their areas. But some bloggers, even some company's official bloggers, are lack of appropriate training on public relations. Another weakness that I noted in the article is the credibility and status of some bloggers. Most bloggers (65%) do not consider themselves “journalists,” most bloggers (84%) post infrequently, only about half of all bloggers (56%) make any effort to check their facts, most bloggers (60%) do not publish corrections, and most bloggers (95%) get their news content exclusively
from the Internet, according to Kent's research. Therefore, it is important for the PR professionals to distinguish whether this blog or blogger is worthwhile of their efforts to reach.

I am currently interning with Alarcon PR and is doing media relations for our client: Actionable Business Training, which just launched a "Start My Own Successful Business" seminars for small business wannabes and entrepreneurs to start and grow their business. I am reaching many bloggers, who write on small business and entrepreneurs. From my experience, the fundamentals of working with bloggers are the same as with traditional journalists at traditional media outlets: respect their schedules; take time to read their material to learn their interests; and only contact them if/when they want to be contacted.

Reference: Michael Kent (February 12, 2007). Critical Analysis of Blogging in Public Relations. Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 32–40