Dealing With Bloggers

Janet Johnson and Robert Scoble

• Marqui paid bloggers to talk about the company
• Received a lot of bad press, was called lots of nasty names
• Positive or negative feedback aside, it did raise the level of brand awareness
• Develop a thick skin, be absolutely honest, have a point of view, do your research, engage detractors, drive to closure on topics
• Pitching bloggers: build a relationship by sending information that’s not about your company, then pitch the blogger
• Some bloggers don’t want anything from PR people
• Never act like you’re entitled to a link
• Marqui now focuses more on blogging themselves instead of paying bloggers
• Steve Rubel gets his companies stories into the blog world by being a resource for information first, and inserting messages from the companies every 10 or 20 posts
• Microsoft product teams are changing the way they develop products based on the feedback they get from customers on the blogs they run
• Simply Hired used the blog as a way to make fun of the error messages they were sure to give users as they went into a beta product launch
• Silence at a problem causes people to think that the company has something to hide
• Scoble had a journalist libel him, he responded and made himself available to bloggers that linked to the story, ended up turning the tide against the journalist
• People are not fanatics, they are smart about what they read
• Bloggers are the kind of people who help shift public opinion
• Podcasting is powerful because the human voice feels more real
• The legitimacy gained by linking to someone that gets your story wrong is short term, credibility is long term
• Linking to people that disagree with you also shows credibility
• Businesses can also use their blogs to give the people that use their products advice on best use cases or tutorials the product and other parts of their jobs
• Great amplification effect for little time and money invested
• Blog search traffic is growing at about the same rate as blog writing - doubling every 5 months
• When you’re in a crisis - overcommunicate

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