New Rules

In the book New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott it talks about blogs and how a lot of PR people aren't blogging or reading blogs.  There is a quote saying "In five years, I can count on one hand the number of PR people who have commented on my blog or reached out to me as a result of a blog post or story I've written in a magazine."

I understand that blogs are important and PR professionals should be monitoring them, especially in regards to their company or product but if you aren't really a blogger or someone very comfortable or familiar with social media it is harder than it sounds to check different blogs everyday.  I grew up with computers and social media is second nature to me at this point in my life.  I have an iPhone and the first thing I do in the morning is check my email, Twitter and Facebook.  It's like the older generation's version of reading the newspaper.  But instead of news I'm seeing more what is going on in the immediate world around me.  But for some reason blogs are still a mystery to me most of the time.  I'm not really sure how to find them, what to be looking for, and up until a few days ago I had no idea how to follow them.  If I'm having this much trouble with blogs I can't imagine how hard it must be for the older PR professionals who haven't even mastered Twitter and Facebook.  Social media is a lot to keep up with.  It is constantly changing and evolving and if you miss the changes you can really fall behind.

With social media always evolving I don't think, for me at least that I don't read blogs because I don't want to I just need to become more accustom to the ways blogs work.  When I first joined Twitter it took me a while to get a handle on things and now I love it.  I think the PR world needs to recognize that  a lot of little blogs talking about your product can have a much bigger impact than we thought and bloggers are here to stay.  They shouldn't be ignored.  And it would do us all good if we could figure out the blog world a little better! With everything else it just takes time.