PRs turn focus to bloggers rather than journos

> The product is designed to allow anyone making presentations to easily >annotate them in their own handwriting.

So this would be a pencil.

Not exactly a full disclosure that Disney is paying for the trip but the average viewer of her vlog likely wouldn’t care either way. And hers is a better disclosue than some newspapers’.
A few years ago, Samsung took a journo from The Australian to its DigitAll event in Asia that resulted in a two-page major feature in the paper’s Media section. There was no disclosure of the fact that Samsung had paid for the trip at the time. There was a disclosure the following week, though.

PR agencies have been working with bloggers and online media, in exactly this way, for years now. This isn’t new or innovative by any account, although I’m sure Pearl PR promoted it as such to get the story written up.

I don’t understand why so many PRs / marketers so obsessed with bloggers in Australia – when online forums and social networking sites are FAR more popular and influential.

Is it because most people’s experience of social media is reading US case studies – stories of US blog success – rather than recognising that the Australian social media space is VERY different?

Or is it because it’s very easy for people who are drilled in publicity to replace the word “journo” with “blogger” – and do exactly the same thing – whereas engaging with communities involves a substantially different set of rules of engagement?

Or is it that many Australian PRs / marketers are too fearful of engaging with communities directly – and would rather handball a message to a proxy such as a journo / blogger / media buyer and hope that it is broadcast out to “mass audiences”?

Just to correct the record, no two-page features about, or inspired by, the DigitAll conference have ever run in the Media section of The Australian, to my knowledge.

The definition of ‘blogger’ for the Papershow event is clearly fairly elastic — I got an invite and I’ve been working as a journalist full-time since 1994.

I think bloggers are very important for getting the word out. I very rarely read many sections of the paper because the news there when it comes to technology, film, media and television is often just wire reports or slower than bloggers that have dedicated sites about areas that interest me. Facebook is massive but how are you supposed to reach those people? Ads? please….

Getting communities of interest to connect with your brand and product certainly isn’t new.

What the diablogue gives us is the opportunity for a much larger geographical and cultural group to be part of the debate. No surprise PR is using it to reach their target.

To Con’s point above, I don’t think that there is a great distinction these days between blogs, on-line forums and social networking. And if all of these mediums represent a means to connect to consumers / communities of interest, then all the better for the brand and business.

We were talking about the “stake-holder” interest that consumers had in brands and businesses way before the on-line community was formed. What we now have is the opportunity to reach the masses much more easily and get immediate (good and bad) feedback. Successes and failure are much more immediate and prominent which has to be a good thing empowering the consumer and business.

Slow news day?

Interesting. I wonder what sort of response they received from the event.