Where Are My Hits?? Helping Clients Understand the Value of Blog Coverage

Posted: September 11th, 2009 | Author: aly | Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off

PR & Marketing Director for ZooLoo.com

Melissa Rzeppa, PR & Marketing Director for ZooLoo.com

By: Melissa Rzeppa, PR & Marketing Director for ZooLoo.com

A few weeks ago, I was excited to secure a great placement on a high-traffic blog for the company I work for. That same week, we had some other blog hits that all came out very positively and the marketing team was really excited. When I shared the placements with my boss, he said “Great. Now where are my hits?”

I was momentarily confused, but quickly realized what I had forgotten and what many of my fellow PR colleagues complain about all the time…. the companies we market don’t always see the value in blogs.

My boss, for example, still sees print coverage as the ultimate winner, despite having a background in Internet marketing. This is understandable. In his eyes and the eyes of many others, blogs aren’t “real” journalism, right? It’s too new, too unstable. Print is what business travelers read on airplanes and in hotels, it’s what executives read while having Starbucks in the morning.

But, is it? As print media continues to die and newspapers focus more on the online space, the line between a traditional news article and a blog is pretty blurry. Many reporters not only contribute to the print and online versions of the media outlet they work for, but they also have their own blog.

I recently attended a Girls in Tech panel on Journalism 2.0 at the MySpace headquarters in San Francisco where the topic of citizen journalism was top of mind for many. On the panel were some exceptional journalists and bloggers, including Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal who led the discussion. The result of the conversation told me that bloggers are citizen journalists, and visa versa… generally translated: bloggers are members of the public who engage in journalism.

If that is true, then how in the world can you undervalue the importance of blog placements? When a citizen journalist, or blogger, believes in your brand, they talk about it. They not only talk about it on their blog, but also throughout the social media world. They tweet about it, they share it on Facebook, they StumbleUpon it, Digg it and they spark conversation about it. They respond to comments from readers, they link to the brand’s website, they talk about the brand’s products and suddenly the client has loads of actual feedback and thoughts from current customers and potential new customers. Some comments may be negative, but you can respond in a matter of seconds to that negative feedback (without being defensive) and show that your brand cares about what consumers think. Maybe it doesn’t follow AP style guidelines, and it probably isn’t written in reverse pyramid style, but does that matter?

Print coverage is great to have, but it’s not nearly as measurable or as long-lived. Besides knowing the circulation of a paper, how else do you know how many people actually read the article? With a blog, you can see the number of unique daily visitors, check who clicked which links, find where the traffic was referred from and if you really wanted, you could dig even deeper than that. And, print articles are really just recycled after they are read. Web articles have a long life, and are constantly seen by new eyes through Google searches or links.

I still get that super-high “woohoo” feeling when I secure a big print story or a TV spot and I see the finished product. I still grab extra copies to save, and you can bet that I’ll send the segment link to my mom. But, blogging is where it’s at.

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