Luke Armour – Digital Marketing and Public Relations Observations, Commentary, Frivolity

This is a little late, but I've been mulling this topic over for a while.

Spawned by this this post by Wagstaff, I've been wanting to post something about this since I read it as well as add some of my own thoughts on the subject. Wagstaff goes into detail about PR people and bloggers, it's an interesting read. Be sure to read the transcript of Richard Edelman's Q & A linked from Wagstaff at Weinberger's site as well as Richard's own commentary on the subject. There are some tips that you can sort through.

Bloggers. Bloggers are people, too. Sometimes they are rather influential people, but they're people. How does one, as a blogger, balance life and blogging? Mike Sacks wrote an interesting post recently about how disappointed he is with PR bloggers the other day. His point was this: Write about PR if you're a PR blogger. I mostly agreed with him. But nobody is just a PR blogger. These people are also tech geeks, PR pros, fathers, sisters, managers, idealists, realists and daughters. You have to sort through what is out there and find things that resonate with you. (Read the comments on Mike's post, too, they're interesting. Oh, also, Mike doesn't like it when bloggers write about blogging, so he's probably rolling his eyes about this, too. 😉 I can't help it.)

We're used to journalists writing about their beats. A journalist rarely mentions in a post about political unrest in Kerplakistan that his daughter is teething and isn't that cute. Would I read a magazine that didn't stay on topic? Probably not. But blogging is different, blogging is people, blogging is all the person at least some of the time. That's what makes it so cool.

But the balance is hard to attain. Where does one put the fulcrum? Am I a PR blogger or a person? Am I a professional or a guy with a chip on his shoulder? Am I a representative of my agency or a solitary entity. All of the above I guess. I suppose we all find our groove and fit into it, as both a blog reader and a blog writer. It is incredibly hard for me to unsubscribe to feeds I've been reading since I found the blogosphere even though I rarely find anything of value to me in them. Why? Because I might miss something. And it's also hard for me to write about things that interest me if I feel my readers might find them off topic, but it's who I am.

We should all really be grateful that I'm not blogging about the Stanley Cup Playoffs (I probably would be, except that I don't get OLN).

So, blogging is an anomaly that we're not really quite used to merging with the "real world" yet, there's clearly a dichotomy between who we are and who we present ourselves to be. And it's something we need to be ready for if we are to work with bloggers to help spread our messages. I'm up for the challenge.

Filed under: Future of PR, Public Relations, Social Media | 4 Comments »