Hey bloggers - who are you? Where do you live? What do you think about? What makes you blog? These are the questions that excited marketing and PR folks are trying to answer. So they can target you and get you to be excited about what they have to say. Are you an aspiring journalist? Or a loudmouth with spare time. What is your motive? Everyone has a motive. There has to be a reason to blog.
I'm in more and more meetings today where we discuss "bloggers" - this elusive, opinionated group of influencers. Wait a minute. I'm a blogger. Does that mean I'm a special class of PR person exuding tremendous influence across my 37-member Bloglines subscriber base? No. It means I'm passionate about a topic and started to write about it - to experiment with the idea that others may actually care about what I say - and, quite honestly, to pump up my PR firm. Some people took an interest in my thoughts and so now I keep on, keepin' on. I haven't written a post in a while and it nags at me. Maybe that's a good thing. It shows that I care about my blog. Maybe it shows my vanity. What is my blego rating today?
PR consultants are trying to get their arms around the blogosphere. Good luck. Technorati can barely keep up. Bloggers are people. Yes, some have an audience. Journalists are people with an audience, too. Do you pitch bloggers like journalists? Yes and no. Everybody is pitching something. Pitching, selling, story telling - whatever you call it. You introduce ideas, concepts and news that you think will interest them. How? By reading their blogs and getting to know them. The same way you get to know other people in your lives - watching, learning and then initiating a dialogue.
PR folks should be good with people. You're in the business of relating to the public and that means a whole lot of different people with a different view of the world. You better be quick on your feet and ready to look at a situation from several different angels. If you can't work with people - guess what? You aren't going to do well working with bloggers either. Bloggers are you and me. They take in information and put it into a cognitive file cabinet called the brain. If you don't fit the label on one of the drawers in the file cabinet, you'll probably be thrown in the trash unless you are really, really good and then maybe, just maybe, you'll find a drawer of your own.
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