PR and the Social Web

It is widely agreed that bloggers and podcasters dislike getting press releases; well, so do most journalists that I have met.   If we want to engage with bloggers we must establish certain things.  Are they relevant to us in terms of reach and authority?  Are we relevant to them, is what we are pitching well targeted, will they be interested and do they accept pitches at all?  Many bloggers do not.

If we have overcome all of these hurdles I firmly believe that we can talk to many bloggers or podcasters in the same way as we approach journalists – by e-mail and by telephone and on the odd occasion by actually meeting.   So is this new form of public relations just the same as the old?  Well, some bits of its are and some aspects are entirely new. 

The world is considerably more complex but the traditional skills of a good PR person are particularly useful in this new environment where much of the media has become socialised.   In addition to pitching ideas offline we can have  conversations with bloggers very simply just by adding a post or a comment to their blog.   Remember that this is a conversation in public and that mostly they will talk back.