By Danny Sullivan
A lot of PR people seem to be a little nervous when it comes to dealing with the blogosphere. There exists a sentiment that there is some kind of black magic at play – and if you don’t know the magic words you might end up spending the rest of your days as a toad flack.
Fear not. Bloggers are not really any different from the media – they have the same interests, in the same topics and, for the most part, respond to PR in a similar way to the media. If approached, they are not (usually) inclined to destroy your fledgling career with a casual flick of their wand.
There are certainly some ways to make your life easier when dealing with blogs, but none of these are unique to the space. Like the media, bloggers prefer to know about stories in advance, so embargoes are appreciated and usually honoured without question. And in the same way as the broader media despise receiving news that is irrelevant to them, so too bloggers rail against such indiscretions. Basically, if something usually pisses the media off, then you can be pretty sure it’ll piss off a blogger too.
In fact, continuing to refer to bloggers and the media as two separate entities is probably well past its sell-by date. The large numbers of media sites that have now recast themselves in a blog-style format is surely proof enough of this. They must be considered one and the same by PR people and should not be avoided out of fear of the unknown.
/// COMMENTS
No Comments »Linda Moran
June 02, 2008 9:13 pmThe use of the term “a toad flack” made me laugh out loud. No doubt there are many inmedialog readers wondering “what is a toad flack?” and “how to I go about flacking my own toad?”
Nice that the blog has some international flavour to it.
Alec Saunders
June 12, 2008 8:46 pmI don’t know that bloggers and journalists are necessarily different, excepting that journo’s generally have editors and editorial policies. The lack of either can make bloggers a more difficult group to reach out to, but… they can become fierce advocates as well which is less likely than with a “real” journo.