Wednesday, January 21, 2009

A Blogger and PR Exec walk into a bar...

Ok so it wasn't a bar, it was Edelman's offices on Stephens Green, but there were Bloggers and PR types. All in all the format was simple, a member of each camp gave an overview of what each group are all about, and then we had a group Q&A.

So what did we talk about?

The subject that probably took up the most of our time was how to approach Bloggers, from the perspective of a PR agency. In my own opinion I found it somewhat funny that the main piece of information that the PR guys would walk away with was that Bloggers aren't paid for what we do and we therefore generally have no interest in acting as brand representatives for some global corp. Further to this, it is common practise to send journalists and tv/radio types samples/tickets/freebies (etc. etc.) and yet no one ever thinks of doing the same to Bloggers.

Hopefully the PR guys really did walk away with an understanding that to communicate with anyone, Blogger or not, it is best done on a personal level. Isn't that what every ad tries to do - interact with someone as an individual? Why would you do it differently when you're actually trying to communicate with an individual.

There's another session planned for February, drop Damien a comment if you'd like to go. I'd highly recommend it.

On that note - a huge thanks to Damien for organising the whole thing. Bang up job. Cheers to Piaras too for the kind use of the venue.

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