First and foremost, congratulations to Interpublic’s MWW Group* who have announced the formation of a new “specialty” practice called Blog 360 which will “work with clients to develop proprietary blogging strategies, from creation and marketing to sponsorships and advertising, geared to increasing relevance among target audiences”.
Kudos to one of the larger PR firms who have recognized the value of blogs and blog expertise. From a marketing perspective the news has already been widely covered across the PR blog community – which while not necessarily the most read Internet segment – reaches a relevant audience.
However, if the creation of this group is anything more than a marketing ploy it does raise a concern. This is the same tactic that saw the creation of many “interactive” divisions back in the boom days. Groovy offshoots and departments of people solely focused on online tactics, measurement and influence. How many of those “divisions” are still around? The majority have disapeared or been folded back into the mothership.
The reason is this. Public Relations is about communications. Therefore all your practitioners should have knowledge of the channels, techniques and approaches to those channels. It’s no good having an ivory tower in the corner of one of your offices, this knowledge must leak across your entire firm.
So let’s give MWW Group their (in my opinion) deserved moment in the sun and then let’s get back to the more important business of raising awareness and understanding of blogging, podcasting, search engine optimization etc to all practitioners.
*Notes:
- I’m not providing a link to MWW’s website because to be honest the Flash navigation is so bad it upsets me
- I notice that the firm hasn’t actually posted the press release to their (awful) website yet… damn difficult to get those scrolling flash news headlines changed I bet.
- Finally with this new division of blogging experts, did they actually target any PR blogs with the news? Not me anyway….
Murphy's Law 