It used to be the dirty little (not so secret) in tech PR, that key influencers like industry analysts guess what, surprise, surprise… they have their own agendas and bottom lines to cover.
Well at least those influencers sported pinstripes, and wore their agendas and affiliations on their sleeves.
A danger in treating bloggers as just another breed of media or analyst misses the point that many have inherent conflicts of interest. For starters, most have day jobs since blogging pays the way for a rare few. Some consult, start companies, and take stakes in ventures related to the fields they blog about.
As top mobile tech blogger Ajit Jaokar said in his interview on this blog:
Most PR people do not understand the blogging world. I am not a
journalist. I have different personas, for instance publisher, author,
PhD student etc. I find PR companies do not look beyond the obvious –
they treat bloggers as targets for their press release and expect the
blogger to be a journalist/media person – which in many cases, they are
not.
So, you are well advised to not treat bloggers as just more names on media and analyst lists – get to know who the person is behind the blog. This should not be that hard to do.
Also, I saw a fairly interesting and related post on Gawker today: Bloggers to Flacks: Pay Us
It discussed a survey by lobbying and PR firm APCO Worldwide about the state of blogger and PR relations. Here’s an excerpt from the Gawker post:
Over half of PR people said they do a good job sending bloggers
relevant information, but two thirds of bloggers disagreed. And less
than 40% on both sides agreed that “bloggers are journalists and should
be treated as such.”
…And the biggest disconnect of all didn’t really make the bloggers
look like the righteous bunch. 96% of flacks disagreed with this
statement: “It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my
clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.”
But almost half of bloggers agreed. They want to get paid, yo!
