With blogs fast becoming authoritative sources of news in their own right, the avenues you need to reach to get comprehensive publicity coverage can sometimes appear infinite. But you do need to communicate with far more than just traditional media outlets.
Spend a bit of time online researching who is writing the most authoritative and informed blogs on topics relevant to your business. You will easily be able to find the blogs you should be talking to.
People in your industry will be aware of leading blogs. The Technorati website shows who the most popular global blog sites are. Google’s Blog Search works well if you type ‘New Zealand’ after whatever topic search you are after.
“Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”
The way blogs work include “collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections,” Jarvis says.
Traditional news outlets like to project the impression that their story is the definitive version .
Whereas, as the Irish Independent reports, journalism – as practised by bloggers – exposes the workings of a scoop. “[High-profile technology blog] TechCrunch, for instance, publishes the beginnings of a story that may only be a rumour. The responses to that rumour, often from reliable sources, generate updates to the story, which is polished with the help of readers to get closer to the whole truth.”
“This is journalism as beta,” Jarvis writes. “Every time Google releases a beta, it is saying that the product is incomplete and imperfect. It’s a call to collaborate.”
And that call to collaborate is drawing millions of blog readers and comment writers. If you want your company to be where the word-of-mouth action is, you need to be noticed in the blogosphere.
Blogs are a powerful way to pull readers to your website, to educate and entertain them and lead them to action on your website. But how do you attract readers to your blog?
Compelling, useful and regularly updated material is, of course, essential. But other communication tools can also be useful to advertise your blog across the web.
Twitter: I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for a few months now and have more than 100 followers (people who have clicked to ‘follow’ - aka subscribe - to my Twitter feed). This is a small number compared to the many people with thousands of followers but the number is steadily growing every day.
So how do I attract them to my blog?
I put up an appealing (I hope!) Twitter post (aka a Tweet) about each blog post I make, and link back to my blog post. My followers and the many other Twitter readers can see it and can visit my blog, if they are attracted to my message, simply by clicking on the link . If you search and monitor the Twitter traffic, you will easily find people with an interest in the information on your blog and can tailor your Twitter messages to attract them.
Similarly with social media sites: I put up brief posts about my blog items on a social media site with a similar subject matter to this blog. People read the post and then come to my blog to learn more. Measurement of my most heavily read blogs shows that a significant readership has come directly from this social media site.
Email: The Copyblogger site recommends pushing people to your blog using an email newsletter. Copyblogger says email your blog’s RSS feed as a newsletter; start a simple opt-in email newsletter; link back to your blog; and place newsletter subscription tools everywhere.
You have to experiment a bit with linking to your blog from various other online services, but give it a go and see what works for you.
You might also be interested in these articles from other sites:
A good new article details how U.S airline South West uses social media tools in its PR work: from employee-writen blogs to Twitter accounts, podcasts, video and a social networking site.
Each tool is overseen by a single team member and is geared to reach a slightly different audience.
South West recommendskeeping social media channels distinct. It has used its employee-written blogs to look at issues, Twitter to break or tease news (South West also uses it to share photos, highlight competitions and job opportunities) and its Facebook account to highlight promotional events.
The article says that the airline’s Flickr group pool is for customers interested in posting or viewing photos of trips on the airline; the YouTube channel is for people wanting information about destinations or South West trivia; and South West’s Facebook fan site is for people wanting to know about airline-related events and news.
(Better read the article promptly! The guys at Ragan, who have published this article, only leave things up for a few days. You can register on their site, though, to read all their back copies. It’s well worth the effort to register.)
Trying to find social media conversations relevant to your industry but not sure where or how to look for them — here’s some mighty tips from the guys at ReadWriteWeb.
It shows how to identify the top blogs on any topic; how to find their most popular recent posts and their best blog archives; and how to find where else they are having conversations online.
A little bit techie but easy enough to follow and worth its weight in gold. It will let you more easily keep in the know about what people are saying about your industry and, more importantly, what they could be saying about your organisation.
Righto, our first blog post and it’s a great little video that explains … what blogs are and what they’re good for, and consequently why we are going to be spending time here when maybe we should be getting out a bit more.
