It’s all very well and good to tell PR peeps that you need to talk to bloggers. But with 40 million blogs, and more coming online every day, finding the right bloggers in your client’s space is always tricky. And very often the so-called top bloggers can change almost in an instant.
To address this PubSub (disclosure - they are a client) has been quietly rolling out community lists. These are human-edited lists of the top bloggers in any particular field, ranked according to links in and updated daily. So if you are looking to find out who is the most linked-to blogger covering real estate (for example) you can go to PubSub’s real estate list and find out.
The secret sauce here is that the lists are maintened by people in that particular field, and the lists are updated daily according to the most current link activity.
This week PubSub announced some new lists coming in the next few weeks. The literature blog list is already up. Next week a couple more come on line. Stay tuned to this space for the news.
I’m asked constantly by traditional PR types how they should approach the blogger in the wild. As if bloggers were some strange species found only in exotic locals and incapable of responding to an email or phone call. Kami Huyes touches on some of this in her recent post Blogger Relations: 5 Basic Cultural Facts so I’ll throw in my own theory here.
There’s a woman in our town, let’s call her Louise (real name Louise). She has no official position as far as I can tell but if you need to know when it’s time to register your daughters for Girl Scouts, ask Louise. If you lost the flyer and need to know when you can drop off books for the Library Book Sale, ask Louise. If your son is of Scouting age, Louise just might remind you that registration is coming up. And more importantly, if you are peeved about funding for the school arts program and are looking to find other parents interested in getting something done, Louise knows who to call.
Louise is what I call a proto-blogger. She’s connected, interested, opinionated and is generous with what she knows. The only thing missing is a TypePad account.
The point for PR folks is this - bloggers blog because they have something to say and like being recognized for whatever expertise they have. They don’t blog because they want to be ignored, or talked to with market-speak. They like conversation, not lectures. They believe in sharing, not controlling knownledge. Keep that in mind and you have the basis of a good blogger-relations program. Ignore it and you’ll be on the Bad Pitch Blog.
I’ll have more to say on this subject in the not too distant future.