Blogs and RSS - A New Direction in PR and Marketing Practice

There is no doubt that blogging has become an influential part of the Internet. According to Technorati they monitor over 2.5 million blogs and there are 12,000 new blogs every day. And along with blogs comes the new technology of content syndication with RSS feeds.

Bloggers can have a significant effect on your business. A blogger originally broke the Enron scandal. Dan Rather’s use of unverified material on CBS was brought to a head by bloggers.

Even the Public Relations Society of America felt the power of blogging when a storm of blog posts appeared about the fact that the PRSA national conference was not covering blogging as a PR function.

The plus side of blogging is the fact that it can build a reputation and thought leader status for the blogger and create a communication channel with your audience.

Two good examples are Steve Rubel, VP of client services at CooperKatz, a mid-sized New York City public relations firm and Robert Scoble of Microsoft.

Scoble has humanized the face of Microsoft and Cooper Katz has leveraged Rubel's blogging success into a new area of PR practice to help corporations monitor, analyze, plan for and respond to issues that might bubble up from blogs.

Sally Falkow, senior Internet Marketing strategist at the Los Angeles based firm, Expansion +, writes a blog about how to leverage these new communication technologies for PR and marketing Professionals. http://www.expansionplus.com

“Back in November 2004 I suggested that PR and Marketing firms should add blog monitoring and advice to their service offerings,” says Falkow
http://falkow.blogsite.com/public/item/70109

She has been assisting mid sized companies to make the most of business and marketing blogs for the past year. “Not only does a blog build a profile for you and your company, it also raises your visibility in the search engines,” says Falkow.

“The IAB study done in 2004 showed the positive effects of a page one search result on brand perceptions and the recent figures from OneUp Web reveal an exponential increase in traffic and conversion rates occurs when a website appears on page one.”

“A well-written blog based on a content strategy builds a ‘cloud’ of content on a focused subject,” says Falkow. “This will increase your presence on the Internet much faster than any other strategy. Any form of blogging will get you some results, but using a good blog platform, having a content strategy and knowing how to make the most of your business blog makes a remarkable difference.”

2005 is being called the Year of the Blog. Agencies and CMOs should be taking advantage of the phenomenon.