The WSJ reports on TV marketers' experimentation with blogola, or the practice of lavishing gifts and attention on bloggers as a PR strategy: "To Create Buzz: TV Networks Try A Little Blogola."
At the risk of sounding like a slimy PR guy, marketing money spent in the blogosphere is money well spent. As the communications guy for Lulu, I worked with journalists from all over the world to provide the material for stories. The media-bashers among you may have a hard time believing it, but in my experience the most skeptical group of reporters on the planet -- the most hyper-sensitive about being influenced by PR in any way -- were American journalists. To a person they like to think of themselves as above the filthy fray of commerce.*
Bloggers, despite the widespread self-perception that they are more independent than traditional media, are comparatively easy to flatter and to influence. Having said that -- and probably pissed off quite a few readers in the process -- I don't think there is anything wrong with the kind of blog-directed PR being described in the WSJ story. A few bloggers are allowed to get an inside look at the production of tv shows.... how cool is that?
The value of blogs as a new branch of media arises NOT from their emulation of the values and standards of conventional media, but from the genuine individual perspectives blogs can offer: a powerful, if anecdotal, window into the pool of consciousnesses in which we might otherwise swim oblivious.
If the blogger in the WSJ article who met Julia Louise-Dreyfuss writes something about how cool the actress turned out to be, as a reader I am capable of seeing that sentiment for what it is but still finding it interesting. A professional journalist can't be transparently starstruck, but bloggers are free to remain true to their own raw reactions, complete with biases, flaws, and insights.
I don't go to Amazon.com's customer reviews for the same information that I expect from ConsumerReports.org, but as a consumer I want access to both. And as a PR guy, I'd want to have a strategy for each of them.
[Blogging Journalist Munir Umrani expects a controversy, but my guess is that not enough bloggers subscribe to the WSJ to arouse one...]
[* British journalists, on the other hand, were much more likely to reproduce entire sections of our press releases and to take in general a much more collaborative approach to writing stories. At Lulu we also had lots of cases where UK journalists came into interviews fully intending to savage the notion of self-publishing and left with those intentions intact, which is just as inane as the opposite approach.]
