Bloggers are the new black

The media landscape traditionally consisted of print, television and radio. Since the Internet (1989) we’ve become saturated with new media that requires PR practitioners to be skilled and adept in understanding and using both traditional and new media platforms such as digital and social media. For this post I really want to hone in on the pivotal role blogging is playing in the media landscape and how important bloggers are to the PR industry.

During my internship I’ve noticed how much Cardinal Spin valued bloggers. They had massive matrix lists of influential bloggers from fashion to trade and everything else in between and invited them to a plethora of our events as media guests. I can now see why my all my previous PR classes highlighted how bloggers have impacted the media landscape and their role as new influencers in the PR and media industry. One of my responsibilities was up keeping matrix lists and I began to come across blogs that have huge subscriber lists full of hundreds and thousands of active followers.  The types of blogs that we learnt about in class are the types of blogs my company saw as a stakeholder:

Personal blogs: focus on personal convictions, ideas, and suggestions about topics. Could be helpful or hurtful to an organisations image, reputation and activities.

Topic or industry blogs:  focus on the nature, history, developments, trends and players in a given subject area or industry. Tend to be bloggers with authority and influence in an area, so high credibility factor.

Publication based blogs: talk about subjects via editors and reports who blog about it.

Corporate: offer insights, assessments, commentary on the company, perhaps from a board member or CEO.

I think that PR companies are beginning realise the strong influence bloggers have as their news distribution is global, unrestricted and instant. In our digital world this form of media can be perceived more trustworthy and can be an asset to companies if they spread desired information about a company and their products or service.