Importance of Blogs in Any PR Program

I want to spend a brief amount of time talking about including electronic media in your public relations outreach programs. The short version is that you better do it. Here’s the longer version.

At this point most new clients still don’t get how useful blogs can be in addressing their customers. When a new client comes in I’d estimate that only 10% mention targeting blogs in their initial plans. Most people are focused on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and of course Oprah, but it’s still a small minority that ask, “How can we handle blogs?”

Over the course of the past few years the blog has become one of the most important sections of media, yet people still neglect it in their strategy. The chart above indicates the popularity of online media sites as of Q4 2006, the latest this type of chart was produced. You’ll notice the top media sites are the old standards (in blue) such as nytimes.com and cnn.com. You’ll also notice, in red, blogs such as Engadget, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker.

Believe it or not blogs are becoming the go to source for information for much of the U.S. Consider that:

• As of 2006, 40% of Americans read blogs. In 2005 that number was only 6%.
  Source: Synovate/Marketing Daily Survey & Forrester Research
• Though traditional media is still trusted by more people at 59%, blogs are becoming increasingly relied on with 50% of people saying they trust this new medium. That number is much higher when you isolate only those surveyed who were between 18 and 24.
  Source: BBC/Reuters Media Poll

For many of our clients being mentioned on a blog can have more impact than a profile piece in the New York Times.

As I mentioned above Lifehacker and Gizmodo are two of the most popular blogs out there so to demonstrate my point I went back to a random month and pulled a random product mention from each to see what happened with their site. We know that when one of our clients gets mentioned in the New York Times, site traffic goes crazy and the phone rings off the hook, so it would follow that a mention on either of these would do something similar. Here goes.

I looked at old entries in July on Lifehacker and Xtimeline, a timeline management tool, was the first mentioned. On Saturday July 28 Lifehacker wrote a two paragraph post entitled “Create a timeline from RSS feeds with Xtimeline”. Shortly after the post Xtimeline’s traffic soared as you can see below.

Engadget was a little tougher since most of the stuff on there comes from major companies that could have traffic swings based on many other factors, but I did find one.

On November 14 Engaget dedicated a small post on Slacker.com, an online radio station and portable satellite music provider. Soon after the mention, "Slacker gets official on portable player", you can see a small bump in traffic to this site. Definitely not as clear as the example above, but I think you can argue that it did have an impact. If I cheated and didn’t look for a random product I guarantee I could have found a similar situation to the above, but I wanted to stay honest and the post happened to be about one of my new favorite sites.

If you don’t believe me try the above experiment for yourself, or better yet start incorporating blogs into your media plan. You’ll be surprised at how powerful a top blog mention can be. If you know anything about the blogosphere, a mention on any, even a small one can be powerful. And as more and more people begin to turn to blogs as a key source of information this effect will only increase.