Business Sunday blog story transcript

 

To blog or not to blog.

Blogging or, literally "web-logging" is one of the fastest growing ways of communicating over the net. Globally, millions of individuals have blogs, or "on line" journals. Now businesses are starting blogs of their own, talking about their products, major developments and industry trends. Ali Moore looks at whether business can afford to ignore the so called "blogosphere".

Bonus! Frank has put up links to the blogs and other stuff from the show.

Comments

[Philip Young]

Trevor, a cynical reader of this transcript would zero in on one quote; you point out that Corporate Engagement is regularly in the top 20 or 30 blogs in the world and this has "certainly helped us win at least one client."

One client? If a bottom line evaluation of the return from one of the best PR blogs really were just one piece of business it would not appear to be a very wise investment of time and resources.

I am confident this is not the case, so perhaps it would be helpful if you could try and sketch out the wider professional benefits that have come from Corporate Engagement.

[Duncan]

Trevor
I admire you and enjoy reading your blog, but if you really think you are in the Top 30 blogs in the world (as per the transcript) I'll be unsubscribing your feed from Bloglines tomorrow because the only possible answer would be that your heavily on drugs and delusional :-)

Great blog, and I'm picky about my bloglines subs, but 7,972 on Technorati and a 3mth Alexa average rank of 380,950...well, its not really top 30, top 300 or even top 3000 now, is it? Sure, top 100 Australian bloggers I'd give you, but I'm really hoping this is a case of you being misquoted.

Duncan.
(until yesterday when I finalised the sale of the blog, The Editor of The Blog Herald, one of the worlds Top 200 blogs/ Top 100 according to CNet...I'd Ive got the stats to prove it :-) )

[Trevor Cook]

Duncan - you're right of course. I don't know whether I was quoted out of context or I just misspoke. What I meant was top twenty or thirty PR blogs. I was relying on the pubsub PR community list for this claim (which admittedly bounce around a fair bit).

[Trevor Cook]

Philip - I'm sure that in the interview I gave a more complete view of the benefits of blogging. The one new client of couse is one that I know actually found our blog when she was looking for some expertise in our field. There maybe others. Prospective clients are often a little vague about where they find you.
But there are many other benefits.
PR itself and the promotion of our expertise itself is not like marketing it is hard to track a direct line through PR activity and sales. I believe blogging (and the collateral media coverage) is very good for our brand. People get bored with agencies and we need to keep showing that we are up with a latest or we'll go stale on the shelf.
More interestingly of course is that our existing clients are starting to look around for expertise in social media if we don't have genuine credentials in this area they'll go somewhere else. We've already done paid work for about six clients on social media related activity. So even at that level its much more than one new client.
What's more, the double benefit I was referring to I think was the fact that PR blogging is a great way to keep building your professional knowledge, which is important for all the reasons above.
I'd like to offer two other caveats - one is that these are early days of social media - esp corporate social media - here in Australia and my view is that we (ie JWM and any other PR outfit hoping to stay competitive) needs to be at the front of the curve of this 'revolution' and not lagging behind trying to play catch-up, after all we always tell our clients that leadership is the only position worth having.
My second caveat is that blogging is so cheap (it actually saves us money compared to brochures etc) that one decent new client is enough to keep me going and I'm sure this year will be better and next year even more so.
BTW - I think this TV interview confirms to me the real benefits of blogging. If you're actually interested in learning or saying something about blogging - or any other subject - relying on TV would be a deeply unsatisfying and unilluminating way of going about it (though I think this was a pretty well put together piece)