Few days back, I talked about how PR firms should approach bloggers and in continuation with that, here are a few interesting results from APAC wide blogger survey (125 blogs) conducted by Text100, a PR firm.
“Bloggers are the new media, they are not to be treated like second-class journalists or expected to behave like traditional journalists. It’s a whole new landscape and PR people should learn to accept it”
- Bloggers concerns included receiving unsolicited spam from PR agencies, and were frequently critical of the content they received, feeling it was inappropriate and unusable.
- While most bloggers ignore traditional press releases, 88% were aware of so-called Social Media Releases and indicated they were in favour of using elements such as videos, quotes, pictures and links from these releases in their posts
- Provide them with targeted information -not mass mailing
- Read and understand blogs first before engaging
- Content is not as important as the relationship. The better the relationship, the better PR firms will know what the blogger wants and how they work
- Avoid mass-mailing!
- An introductory email is essential to ask if interested in receiving information about a specific topic or company.
Essentially, it’s important for PR firms to understand the blogger’s domain/interest and target them aptly.
Dowload the report
Although the survey is a nice initiative, I feel 125 bloggers representing an APAC wide blogger community is too small a number to support the survey. They should have looked at something like at-least 100 bloggers from each country for better results. Currently they have an average of just 15 bloggers from each country (8 countries), which is why this survey seems absolutely baseless to me.
Vivek: While I completely agree that the survey universe is rather small, that too at an APAC level, this was not meant as THE conclusive report. This is a beginning and we sent the survey out to bloggers only after confirming thier interest in participating. We could have tried carpet bombing the survey across to many bloggers online but that would go against the very idea of this exercise.
Plus, we chose bloggers based on various criteria – top tech/ news bloggers in each region based on an internal evaluation. The objective of this initiative is not necessarily to portray Text 100 as the masters of all things social media, but rather to offer a perspective of how PR and bloggers can work together and set the tone for such a discussion.
I’m a blogger myself and have been getting a lot of attention from music labels in India since I’ve been music reviews since mid 2005. I’m sure top tech/ news bloggers may be getting similar attention from other companies/ brands and hopefully the findings will help bloggers streamline such attention and make it more useful for them, as well as the brands that wish to engage with them.
What does ‘second class journalist’ mean? Many of these rules apply to traditional media as well.
Hi Karthik,
If this is just a taste of a bigger report that T100 will be releasing, I will really be looking forward to it.
If would be interesting to know some of the criteria you used to narrow your sample to 15-20 bloggers in each country. A report reader would then know what kind of blogger these results would best apply to.
Vivek