A friend of mine at a Birmingham agency explained that she's spent the last week trying to find out which blogs journalists in a certain industry might read. She is hoping to skip pitching journalists in favour of pitching the bloggers. Journalists will then report it from these bloggers, naturally.
The problem is that this just seems to be too many middlemen.
Client > Agency > bloggers > journalists > public.
A better model should work more like:
Agency > Client > public > bloggers > journalists > more public.
The agency should help the client do something really significant/newsworthy with just a few members of their target audience. This target audience will begin talking about it, a blogger or niche publication will pick up on it. As it grows then journalists will give it some coverage. But really, by that stage, you might not even need journalists to spread the good word.
18 September 2007
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4 comments:
The only issue with your model is that you don't really know whether the journalists are picking the story up from the bloggers or the public. So, you don't really get to see which bloggers the journalists are reading.
I guess it all depends on what your final goal is.
I like your thinking, this issue was raised at a recent conference I attended on Web 2.0 strategies.
The main grey area is whether if clients are contacting public directly would this be considered a sales function?
I understand major players like IBM think the same way as you...
Hi Scott,
I'm not really sure which model you are referring to, the first or second one? The first one is what I disagree with.
I think targetting journalists through blogs they might be reading is a bad way to approach this.
Yem Lee, that's a really good point. I hadn't considered that. I think partly yes. But then if the interactive is still between 'client' and 'public' then the difference should be minimal. There would be conflict between the external PR and internal sales team though I imagine.
Hey Richard, I was referring to the second model.
If the objective is to see which blogs journalists are reading, then it's difficult to determine that using the second model....because you don't know where the journalists are picking up the story from...the bloggers or the public.
If you just feed it to the bloggers (the first model)....then you know for 100% that the only way journalists can pick up that story is through bloggers.
I'm not sure if that makes any sense...
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