While reading a post about the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance by Michael Litman I started to wonder how many of the bloggers in my list of top PR blogs are on Twitter. It turns out most of them are but I am amazed by the number of people who don't have a link to their twitter profile on their blog. Some people have been quite tricky to find!
I am the third person to have been interviewed by Adam Lewis in his series of short interviews with PROs. Adam, who is a final-year PR, Advertising and Communications student at the University of York, has interviewed Tim Whirledge (blog) and Jed Hallam (blog) in the past few weeks.
The blogosphere has been killed off by paid for content produced by PROs and professional bloggers. That's the claim made by Paul Boutin, Editor, Wired magazine, who said: "Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths."
I'm not sure I agree. Certainly paid for blogs produced by professional bloggers or PROs has had an impact on the blogosphere, but I don't believe that it's killed off the blogosphere as professional and amateur bloggers blog for different reasons.
Professional bloggers blog to share news or their opinions about issues affecting the industry they work in, as well as to network, whereas amateur bloggers blog to share their thoughts and ideas, and to keep in contact with friends and family. As long as the barriers to entry stay low, amateur and professional bloggers can co-exist.
Further proof that the blogosphere is far from dead comes in the form of Technorati's recent 'Blogosphere 2008' report, which reveals that 79 per cent of bloggers write personal blogs. This hardly makes amateur bloggers sound like a dying breed.
Instead of pointing the finger at PROs or professional bloggers I would suggest that social networking sites, such as Facebook, have had the biggest impact on the blogosphere. Since many amateur bloggers blog to share news and photographs with friends and family it is no surprise that some have swapped blogs for social networking sites.
Last week I had hoped to attend the London Bloggers Meetup, which was sponsored by Smirnoff. Unfortunately I couldn't make it, but I was impressed by Smirnoff's PR efforts nonetheless.
Prior to the meetup I was sent a personalised email, containing the ingredients to make a cocktail reflecting my blog, or at least my initals. Apparently Mint, Pineapple and Watermelon are all you need! I thought this was a great idea, and by providing an image of my cocktail they made it very easy for me to blog about it.
If I happened to have any questions I was invited to contact Smirnoff via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, e-mail, phone or even by post. Not by carrier pigeon though!
All this before the event even took place.
Following the meetup, photographs were added to the London meetup group, for attendees to check out. And those like me who regret not going!
During a recent trip to Berlin, my friends and I came across moving advertisements in Alexanderplatz. The adverts, which I assume were either robotic or remote controlled, really grabbed my attention as they whizzed around the town centre. At which point my friend said: "I bet Matt blogs about that!" She was right.
Being quirky is a great way to stand out, but it's not sustainable. TV commercials and moving billboards were once new, exciting and different ways to advertise, and so captured the public's imagination. But now they're just background noise, unless the actual advert is interesting.
The same is true in PR. There are plenty of ways to spice up press releases, but if the content is as dull as dishwater than there's no point. Rather than focus all our attention on jazzing up the delivery with pretty designs and social media add-ons, we should ensure the we give the actual press release the same amount of attention. After all it's the really creative adverts that we remember.
Check out this video of mobile adverts in Berlin by Mrneglect:
