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.
