Blogs as sources, blogs as outreach
November 18th, 2005Author: DialogueMedia
Yesterday at Lifehacker, About.com editor Wendy Boswell wrote up an item on “How to Evaluate Sources on the Web,” for the people who are looking to use various sites – blogs and others – as reference material for work, school, or otherwise. Additionally, lots of these tips can be just as valuable in the reverse for those working in the public relations industry who are trying to grasp blogs as a media outlet to reach out to and develop a relationship with.
Working in a public relations firm and having a knowledge of the blogosphere leads to lots of questions as to which blogs can be treated as media outlets and which ones should not. (The answer is really that pretty much all of them need to be given a good level of respect, and we’ll discuss this further as a big topic) Additionally, people need to know which tools can be used to find blogs relevant to their work and their clients’ needs. The neat thing, in a way, with blogs, is that they don’t necessarily discriminate. *Most* bloggers don’t have a problem linking to others who are in the same space. I’ve linked to plenty of “competitor” blogs to either add fuel to the fire or share my own experiences and comments, or just as more fodder for our readers, since perhaps both of us bloggers landed the same announcement or press release in the first place. So it’s not about pitching 500 blogs to get stories. It’s about reaching out to the ones that you have developed a good relationship with and/or believe would be most interested in your client’s story, and let it ride from there. People link to that blog, and the story travels. It’s like every hit is a whole new “wheel” with many potential spokes. You’re also reaching out to people who might never read a particular “big media” outlet, but would do so if a blog they read and respected (which is different from “liked,” mind you) commented or linked to the story themselves.
You almost have to think of the blogosphere as a batch of “new” media (hence the name), where most people you know don’t have past experience with a particular outlet. You can believe that the New York Times is a good outlet to reach out to, because of past experience – either someone else’s, your own, or just public perception as a whole. On the contrary, you don’t know that blog xyz is a solid place to reach out to, because you haven’t necessarily read it regularly, don’t necessarily know anything about the author(s), and might never have searched to see if that blog had already written about what you might want to talk to them about in the first place. So it’s not as easy as finding the Google BlogSearch or Technorati tool, searching some blogs in the space, and dropping a press release in the email. Read the blogs in your space regularly, ask others for recommendations, and do a little research.
