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Blogs and RSS - A New Direction in PR and Marketing Practice

02/13/2005

There is no doubt that blogging is now an influential part of the Internet. According to Technorati, there are 12,000 new blogs a day and they monitor over 2.5 million blogs now. Bloggers have an audience and they are influential.

It was a blogger who originally broke the Enron scandal. Dan Rather's use of unverified material on CBS was brought to a head by bloggers. The brief flap over questionable website content on Target's website was mentioned in a blog and passed on at lightening speed.

Even the Public Relations Society of America felt the power of blogging when a storm of blog posts appeared about the fact that the PRSA national conference was not covering blogging as a PR function.

The plus side of blogging is the fact that it can build a reputation and thought leader status for the blogger. A prime example is Steve Rubel, VP of client services at CooperKatz, a mid sized New York City PR firm. Cooper Katz has leveraged Rubels' high blogging profile into a new area of PR practice to help corporations monitor and analyze and respond to issues that might bubble form blogs.

Sally Falkow, senior Internet Marketing strategist at the Los Angeles based firm, Expansion +, writes a blog for PR and marketing Professionals. http://www.expansionplus.com

"Back in November 2004 I suggested that PR and Marketing firms should add blog monitoring and advice to their service offerings," says Falkow

http://falkow.blogsite.com/public/item/70109

She has been assisting mid size companies to make the most of business and marketing blogs for the past year. "Not only does a blog build a profile for you and your company, it also raises your visibility in the search engines," says Falkow.

"The IAB study done in 2004 showed the positive effects of a page one search result on brand perceptions and the recent figures from OneUp Web revealed an exponential increase in traffic and conversion rates occurs when a website appears on page one."

"A well-written blog based on a content strategy builds a 'cloud' of content on a focused subject," says Falkow. "This will increase your presence on the Internet much faster than any other strategy.Any form of blogging will get you some results,but using a good blog platform and having a content strategy makes a remarkable difference."

Blogging is here to stay.Agencies and CMOs need to learn how to take advantage of the phenomenon.