Edelman Hires Top Advertising Blogger
From AdAge:
"Steve Rubel, by some counts the No. 1 advertising blogger, is going mainstream with a move to PR giant Edelman."
And further in the article …
"Edelman recently has also hired Michael Krempasky, a public-affairs blogger, and Phil Gomes, who writes about online communications. Others agencies have gone a similar route. Weber Shandwick, the world’s largest PR firm, recently hired Jeremy Pepper, writer of popular PR blog Pop PR Jots as group manager in its San Francisco office."
I think this really speaks volumes about what blogging is going to mean to the future public relations operations. I used to consider blogs relatively unimportant, but with the industry jumping on the bandwagon it looks like people are wanting to make sure that they have the best of every aspect of each medium to offer clients.
"Steve Rubel, by some counts the No. 1 advertising blogger, is going mainstream with a move to PR giant Edelman."
And further in the article …
"Edelman recently has also hired Michael Krempasky, a public-affairs blogger, and Phil Gomes, who writes about online communications. Others agencies have gone a similar route. Weber Shandwick, the world’s largest PR firm, recently hired Jeremy Pepper, writer of popular PR blog Pop PR Jots as group manager in its San Francisco office."
I think this really speaks volumes about what blogging is going to mean to the future public relations operations. I used to consider blogs relatively unimportant, but with the industry jumping on the bandwagon it looks like people are wanting to make sure that they have the best of every aspect of each medium to offer clients.
posted by Richard @ 12:13 PM
3 Comments:
At 3:19 PM, August 28, 2006,
Giselle said…
Case in point about the power of the blog: Snakes on a Plane. That movie was largely shaped by the reaction of the online community, and their PR & Marketing people realized it very early on, designing a campaign that appealed largely to this public. You could log on to snakesonaplane.com and actually have Samuel L. Jackson call your friends with a personalized message - talk about a brilliant PR/marketing tool!!
Although the movie didn't have the tremendous box office numbers that had been anticipated, I guarantee that PR teams for the movie studios will be monitoring blogs and other online sources much more closely in the future.
At 3:26 PM, August 28, 2006,
austin said…
I don't understand the importance of blogging. Blogs are something that people do to write about what goes in their personal life or to complain about a situation. Every time I have encountered a blog in academics it has been about a situation in which a person was complaining. I haven't heard of any blogs where the bloggers praise a company or organization. It seems blogs are following the path of television news where the headlines are 'bad' news and the 'good' news is rarely spoken about.
I understand that blogs are a way of interacting on a personal level with people who use a company’s service, but how much credibility do we actually give bloggers. I have read numerous stories posted by individuals about their experiences, but to what extent are these experiences embellished. Posts about how X number of people had similar bad experiences with a company can create an image problem for a firm's client when there truly might not be one because the X number of negative comments are the total number of negative comments, and no one is writing about the positive experiences they had the client.
At 5:38 PM, August 28, 2006,
Richard said…
Let's try to bring this back to nonprofits. Austin raises a very interesting point, and it is one that I too have grappled with when I'm teaching undergraduates the basics of public relations writing. What exactly is the value of blogs?
In my classes, I taught about blog management--not just posting and maintaining your own blog, but also monitoring what others post. You can use the RSS subscribe feature to monitor most blogs, so practitioners can sign up to see who has mentioned them in blog updates.
So, as Austin points out, blogs really should be monitored to maintain a check on the organization's reputation. But, is that all?
Let me leave you with one example of how a nonprofit used blogging, and I'll see if you can think of other ways this new media outlet could be used by the nonprofit sector in their communication activities.
Oceana, an environmental nonprofit in Washington state, used blogging when it was just getting started to reach out to those interested in preserving Washington's ecosystem. Within a month of launching it, Oceana received a check for $5,000 with a note that said the donor followed Oceana's progress on the blog and was impressed with its work. I interviewed their blog manager over the summer, and he said that it has also been very helpful in recruiting new volunteers and activists because they're able to communicate in a more conversational manner.
So what do you think? Any other situation you see where blogs might be a new communication tool for the nonprofit organization?
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