This is the perfect topic for a bloggers’ conference… interesting, relevant, not obvious, something for new and experienced blogger alike to think about… Get a couple more topics like that and you can get some really fascinating debate (and thus conference) going.

In the last couple of years advertisers have been bombarded with the news that online is the future – over press, radio and TV – as that is where they’ll effectively reach their target market. While that increasingly is becoming the reality with younger/ internet savvy USA & UK audiences – where money flows more freely in marketing circles – we’re a generation behind in Australia.

Our angle here is that anyone, even with a limited budget, can get bang for buck by targeting bloggers, facebook or by using Twitter (often inappropriately). As a consequence there has been a rise in spam, commercial trolls, content scraping and sock puppetry in an effort to get bloggers to advertise products, events and venues via reviews. There have also been sites set up to attract advertising dollars by using blogger content, but with no remuneration to the blogger .

It has fallen to PRs to organise this with small digital teams as Ad Agencies currently don’t have enough savvy or resources to manage social networks as part of their ongoing strategies. The PRs don’t necessarily have the knowledge base either but are happy to have a way to extend their services, but sadly it’s still managed poorly.

My concern is that bloggers should be remunerated for advertising anything. Most are happy with a freebie, but as they say, nothing’s really for free. A simple analogy: If you were given a bottle of Pomegranate Molasses by a marketer, would you take it if they insisted on putting a large advertising hoarding in your front yard? If not, why then inflict a promoted product on your regular blog readers if you’re not being paid to do it? Perhaps this is not considered as blogs in general are not structured around goals, themes or targets in the manner of a formal publication?

I suggested on the Australian Food Bloggers Conference forum that bloggers should have a list that they can opt into. I truly believe that there should be lists of ‘floggers’ available to marketers. At present, a company that is charged with online promotion will look for any means to acquire contact information. With short deadlines and limited man hours, the quickest route might be to be unscrupulous, hence the topic of this post.

An opt in list may alleviate some of the current bad behaviour and it would allow advertisers to wash the data, allowing them to speak to the right people who have synergy with the product/venue etc.

There is a great debate going on about how shit some PR people are just in dealing with journalists so what hope there is for bloggers I have no idea.

Check out Mumbrella for a summary here:

http://mumbrella.com.au/prs-versus-journalists-back-in-focus-5183

For all untargeted PR email, I just sort anything from their domain into my spam box, unless they use both my name and the name of my site somewhere in the text of the email.

Lisa, I suppose because I’m a journalist I make a distinction. Blogs do tend to be a personal message but not in the genre of journalism. Journalism would perhaps rely on more research and draw from press releases and events for publication.
I think that is the charm of blogs that they are personal and not news agenda or publicity agenda driven. That doesn’t mean the blogger shouldn’t be targeted as an influencers by PRs as they indeed do target people outside the journalist sphere. I just think there are some different rules of etiquette as there are some subtle differences and blogs don’t run the same Pr led agenda as news. And believe me, you would not believe ho much news is PR driven.