How Do You Build A Community With A Corporate Blog?

John: I really enjoy your blog but I am insulted by the line: "You can still use traditional media tactics, but leave that to the PR department..." which implies that PR just has an understanding about MSM. Since when is "relevant content" not part of a PR professional's job? Since when is driving conversations and buildung an audience (or call it community) not part of a PR pro's job? If you look at the many PR bloggers you'll see that PR is indeed embracing social media. And why all the conversations about how PR should adapt to the changing media world. We all need to work together in the future - the blog & social media consultant, measurement firms, SEO providers and yes, also the PR people. Count them in - not out!

Tina, thanks for the comment. My meaning on the sentence "leave that to the PR department," was leave media relations to the experts - PR professionals.

That does not mean I think that PR professionals cannot provide good advice and can not work as effective bloggers for their company, rather I think the opposite and PR professionals can be very well equipped to work in this new social media environment.

However, a PR professional is often not the best person to blog for their company. If you run a large automobile company, you probably want a car designer to blog. If you run an airline, you probably want an airline attendant to blog. It all depends upon the strategy of the company, and their audience. But I'd guess I'd prefer to read the blog posts of someone whose day job is working inside a particular company rather than conducting the PR. After all in a traditional media article which includes an interview with a company employee. How often do you hear the PR professional referenced, it's going to be the CEO, departmental manager or expert who speaks on behalf of the company because he or she can speak with domain expertise.

Now if you are running a PR agency, it makes perfect sense to me that you'd have a PR professional write the blog posts. I want to learn about their expertise in PR or even the new medium of social media. In fact I think the PR bloggers is one blog community that is really pushing the envelope when it comes to thinking about how to use blogging as a communications tool.

In addition, there are quite a few corporate blogs run by PR consultants who write in public for their customers. And those blogs are successful, sometimes the professional have a lot of expertise in an industry sometimes not.

You will recall the rest of my paragraph stated, "your corporate blogger should concentrate on relevant content and outreach that's helps to propel a community's conversation forward."

What I mean by that is the person who is the corporate blogger. That blogger might be a PR professional. But the tactics the blogger uses to be an effective blogger are blogger relations tactics not media relations tactics.

Here I use my definition of blogger relations, the process of using blogging to conduct a dialogue with your audience rather than pitching other bloggers directly to review or mention your company or product. The term blogger relations can also be defined as the process of pitching bloggers.

You raised the issue that it's the PR professional job to drive conversations and build an audience. You're right PR is the one profession whose primary goal was to drive conversations and the goal is the same today with blogging, yet the strategy to achieve the goal is different.

I distinguish between the tactics of pitching a story to a blogger, and how an effective blogger relations strategy can be conducted. There are certainly elements of an effective public relations campaign that resemble effective blogging. But it's the intent of a blogger relations strategy that distinguishes it from a media relations campaign. An effective blogger would not pitch other bloggers necessarily on a story. And yes, I've pitched bloggers in the past but to me that's PR. Rather an effective blogger comments on other blogs, and writes articles about other blog posts. It's a subtle difference but to me an important one to distinguish between the new profession of blogger relations and old line public relations.

I think it's important to describe the difference because many new people to the world of social media assume that blogger relations and blogging uses existing media relations tactics to be successful. You can use some of those tactics effectively within the realm of blogging. I've talked about Andy Abramson's successful Nokia blogger relations program before and how he has combined PR and BR together. But to run an effective blogger relations campaign you have to use some different tactics from PR.

I don't think that the new profession of blogger relations solely lies within the field of public relations, but borrows elements from PR, SEO, product marketing, customer service and normal conversations to create something new and that by explaining the differences I hope to demonstrate how a company can be an effective blogger.

Thanks for taking the time to respond! Let me just throw out one more tidbit about the changing role of the PR professional. Jeff Jarvis's advice for PR people in the blogosphere included the following:

"Yes, PR people are trained to stay in the background. Get over it."

In my mind - that's exactly what we have to do! We can't control the message anymore thanks to CGM but we can step out of the shadow and add all kinds of new strategies and tactics to our profession - way beyond the art of pitching.

Tina, great quote, and makes a lot of sense to me. I think CGM will mean that PR professionals will get to do more interesting work for their clients. And in the process use every tool in the PR toolkit beyond the realm of media relations.