Unexpected title of the day: PR and blogging….

Tom Murphy

I have to say I’ve been delighted with the response to my post on the need for blogs to be kept in perspective.

From the comments section on this blog and the huge number of personal e-mails I’ve received, my faith in the common sense of practitioners has been restored.

Believe me when I tell you that I am as bored as anyone reading the same rebuttals to the ‘visionary’ nonsense that I read about blogs. However, from a communications perspective this drivel does need to be addressed in an (vain) attempt to ensure that people don’t get the idea that just because it’s on a blog it’s true!

I’m thinking of some ways to save you, my kind reader, from having to read my constant rebuttals and will deliver something in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we should continue to counter the posts from all those lonely ivory blog towers that have been erected across the Internet.

I also believe that if we re-invested the time spent in ‘blog navel gazing’ into actually looking at how blogs can contribute, rather than decimate PR, we’d be much better off.

With that thought in mind, some recent research from Euro RSCG Magnet [website] and Columbia University found that more than half of journalists use Weblogs regularly, though only 1% believe that blogs are credible.

Other findings included that 70% of journalists who use blogs use them for work, with the most popular uses including finding story ideas (53%), research (43%) and discovering story sources (36%).

68% of them believe that blogs will become a more popular tool for corporations seeking to inform consumers, while 56% agree that blogs will remain an independent and unorthodox means of disseminating information. Finally 93% of journalists said they are being “excruciatingly careful” in fact-checking their stories in 2005 — a huge increase from 59% in 2003.

Elswhere the PRWeek/Weber Shandwick Corporate Survey 2005, which included 228 in-house corporate communications professionals, found that more than 40% said they expect their budgets to rise in the coming year, and another 54% believe that their budgets will remain unchanged.

The survey also looked at the effect of blogs. While the majority of respondents were keeping an eye on blogs, only 8% were maintaining a corporate blog at their company, 22% said that they monitor the blogosphere “a great deal”, but close to 50% admitted that they don’t monitor blogs at all.

Now there are some facts about PR and blogging.

You can find some more common sense opinions on the intersection of PR and blogging here: