Ditch Your PR Firm? Wall Street Journal on Why Small Businesses Must Blog

As a precursor to our Small Business Blogging session at our upcoming conference, we highly recommend the article How to Get Attention In a New-Media World by Gwendolyn Bounds. In some ways it contradicts what we know from a few successful blogs who have leveraged traditional PR to get their blogs noticed.

“Three years ago, fledgling New York shoe and dress designer Holly Dunlap hired a well-known public-relations firm to put her brand name — Hollywould — on the map. She paid roughly $6,500 a month as a retainer…Ms. Dunlap, in fact, was seeing results — just not so much from the PR firm. She had begun penning a diary on her Web site, www.ilovehollywould.com, chock-full of juicy details about her personal life, from late-night keg-party revelry in her downtown Manhattan boutique to boozy jet-setting jaunts through Europe…After five months, Ms. Dunlap cut loose her PR firm, betting the Web site could do more to build her company’s image. Today, she spends roughly $700 a month on Web maintenance and commands an average of 20,000 visitors a week, a figure that can triple when her site is mentioned on other Web-site trend leaders such as DailyCandy and Gawker.

Our best PR,” Ms. Dunlap says, “comes from people who are mentioned or featured on our site and forward the link to their friends.” Ms. Dunlap estimates sales of $6 million to $8 million for 2006 for Hollywould, and her wares are now sold in Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Harrods of London, among others.”

I’d say the right strategy is abandon the PR firm that doesn’t “get” blogging (few do at this point.) and get one that does. OR, hire a consulting firm that specializes in engaging with the blogosphere. The problem is that you’ll have a hard time finding a PR firm (good or bad) that isn’t touting a blog-centric strategy. The issue is discovering which ones are blowing smoke, and which ones have their act together.