Just back from a quick coffee with a blog friend, slightly damp (it's raining) and leaping into a session about interacting with bloggers (slightly ironic given the blogging around what some of my US colleagues have been doing. More on that later.)
I'm going to mash my write-up of two different sessions together, because they overlap in an interesting way.
Before lunch I dipped into the Metrics track at Blogher, and boy, did the organisers misjudge the appeal of this session. While the main ballroom session on "Should I Blog?" is very quiet, this session is packed. People are sitting on the floor, people are sitting outside…
Elise Bauer gave an excellent presentation which amounted to "link, link, and link some more". And it's amazing how many people wrestle with this idea — and how many misconceptions there are. For instance, some people were concerned that every outbound link neutralised an inbound link in your Google pagerank. Others worried that linking out would lead to a one way flow of traffic away from your blog.
Elise made the excellent point that worrying about sending traffic to your competition is totally the wrong mindset. You should be thinking about providing the best and most useful content to your readers, and if there's something great on the competition, link to them!
Vanessa Fox from Google was on hand to debunk some of the myths around Google's ranking system.
What did she have to say? A lot of the usual stuff, but it was nice to hear it confirmed from the horse's mouth, as it where. For example, she made the point that having a blog for your website will drive more links to your site from other bloggers and drive up your Google ranking. The text you use to link to another site is hugely important. The relevance of the links you make matters as well (as Google looks at the whole neighbourhood of links around you, both inwards and outwards, when making its decisions about how to rank you).
In other words, it's all about relationships, and relationships was the centre of the afternoon session Forget "the" A-list, Find Your Blogging A-list: effective Blogger Relations. And there were some horror stories to be told: mail merged e-mails from PRs to bloggers.
But, strangely, a lot of what is being said reminds me of exactly what I'd look for as a journalist when a PR is pitching me: some idea of who I am, what I'm interested in and how relevant what I am talking about is for my audience. If anything, this session is underlining to me that bloggers who blog about a particular market are journalists. They're producing journalism, they're just publishing it using a blog rather than a magazine.
Fundamentally, PRs should treat anyone they want to write about their product with respect as an individual, whatever the medium they're publishing in.
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