The Trend of Blogging December 26, 2008
Posted by Angelia Chandra in PR and Web 2.0, Research data, Social Media, Weblogs.Tags: Blogs, Social Media
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Weblogs is one of the applications that play an important role in the PR 2.0 industry.
This year, there are about 346 millions people in this world that read blogs and there is an 11% growth compared to last year. (source: The McCann research – the Social Media Tracker Wave 3).
More and more people are reading blogs online. So I think instead of spending a lot of money for media relations programme trying to convince reporters to cover news, why not try to create a blog or target bloggers to help us convey our messages directly to our target public online? We no longer need to wait for the traditional media to cover our news. We are now free from their filter and we have the power to send our messages across directly to our targeted public and this is all so GREAT!
After setting up blogs or having bloggers write our stories, we should be happy that all our hard work are actually worth it. Just take a look at the research result below:
However, there is a problem. Not everyone is writing a favourable story for us. Someone might post, write or leave negative comments and/or stories in their blogs and we have no control over that. Of course, we should be worried about that!
However, according to David Meerman Scott in his book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”, he said: “I strongly believe that comments from readers offering different viewpoints than the original post are actually a good thing on a blog, because they add credibility to your viewpoint by showing two sides of an issue and by highlighting that your readership is passionate enough to want to contribute to a debate on your blog”.
I agree with David as it is much more credible to have both positive and negative comments/stories on blogs. It makes much more sense to the readers that all the opinions do come from actual users of the products or services rather than just posting some edited comments on the blogs, for example. We need to welcome such negative feedbacks and then find an effective way to handle the criticisms.
More about Social Media December 19, 2008
Posted by Angelia Chandra in PR and Web 2.0, Social Media, YouTube Videos.Tags: Social Media, Web 2.0
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While browsing today, I came across an interesting video on YouTube that helps me understand better about the relationship between PR, Web 2.0 and social media.
This video titled “What’s the Buzz About PR 2.0/Social Media?” is created by Robert Sears, the PR 2.0 Social Media Manager from the SSA Public Relations agency based in Denver and Phoenix – USA. He talks about the usage of social media in PR.
I agree with his statement that in using Web 2.0, PR should engage people when, where and how they want to be engaged. I do really think it is important to find out the “when, where and how” our targeted public want to be engaged with. Now with the emergence of Web 2.0, we have plenty of choices to convey our messages across. We can upload videos on Youtube, upload pictures on Flickr, create a profile on Facebook, post stories on weblogs, and etc. But we can’t just use all of them, we need to know what our target public are really involved with. We need to know whether they only read blogs or watch videos or both.
Another interesting point that Robert made in his video is that social media provides a global public focus group. Everyone expresses their opinions online which somehow lets us know what they think about our products and services. It provides us a valuable insight into what they really wants and needs. So, simply get online and you can follow their conversation to find out what they really wants or needs. This is such a great contribution from Web 2.0 since consumer insight is one important point in PR.
