Anne Truitt Zelenka

Most big companies know how to deal with the press and with industry analysts… they have entire departments devoted to that. But bloggers are the mystery meat of corporate communications. How do you connect with them? How do you relate to them? How do you sort the riff raff from the ones who have important opinions or connections or access to people you need to reach? And most importantly, how do you make them communicate your message? (Hint: on that last point, you’re out of luck… unless your message is one that resonates with them on its merits.)

First, get oriented to the blogosphere conversation that relates to your company before you start reaching out to individual bloggers:

1. Start paying attention to bloggers at your own company. If you already know who they are, start reading their blogs regularly. If you don’t know who they are… ask around or search on Google.
2. Get yourself an RSS reader if you don’t already use one, so as you find bloggers that are relevant to your company and the products you work on, you can follow their blogs. An RSS reader automatically displays new posts as bloggers publish them. It’s a whole lot easier to follow blogs by checking one place–your RSS reader–rather than all the blogs that are potentially relevant to your work. Bloglines is one web-based RSS reader that’s really easy to use. You can subscribe to feeds from traditional news sources too.
3. See how your company and your company’s products are being portrayed in the blogosphere. Check slashdot, techmeme, digg, reddit. Read the ZDNet blogs. How do you do this? On Google, you can search for articles at a specific site by adding “site:” to your query keywords. For example, you could search on “site:blogs.zdnet.com Morfik” (without the quotation marks) to find anything written by ZDNet bloggers about Morfik. Or you can search on dedicated blog search engines like Technorati and Google’s blog search.
4. Track mentions of your company automatically. Now you’ve got an RSS reader and some idea of the conversation around your company and your company’s products. You can use a variety of services to create subscription feeds that automatically search for posts containing keywords and phrases of interest to you. Technorati and Google’s blog search will generate RSS feeds for any search you put together… just grab the URL they provide and add it to your subscriptions in your feed reader. Or try an aggregation service like Talk Digger. Then email bloggers who mention your company or leave a comment on their blog seeing if they have questions.
5. Watch how the blogosphere reacts to your competitors too. You know how to track your own company… now do the same for competitors. You might get some ideas from other technology companies about how to treat bloggers.

Once you’ve got a sense of the broad conversation, you’re ready to connect with specific bloggers. It’s probably worthwhile to seek out noncaptive, nonpartisan bloggers–ones who don’t work for you or consult for you and who aren’t firmly committed to using your products. As you’re reading blog posts in your RSS reader, you’ll certainly come across bloggers who seem like they might have some useful feedback to offer or might take an extra look at your company’s products, given the right nudge. Or maybe a noncaptive, nonpartisan blogger will show up at your conference, interested in seeing what you have to offer. So how to start? Try this:

1. Read and comment on blog posts, as a human being, not as a company representative. Bloggers want readers. Bloggers especially want commenters. If a post resonates with you, leave a comment. It doesn’t have to be about your company. You can engage on a human-to-human level with them.
2. Don’t write off bloggers that aren’t well-known technologists or journalists or industry analysts. Bloggers judge merit differently than the corporate world does… popularity in blogging has more to do with quality of ideas and connection than about credentials. If you limit yourself to those bloggers that seem important from your corporate perspective, you’re likely to miss out on the ones that may be most useful in providing feedback or information or communication pipelines.
3. Check on Technorati or other blog search sites to see what other bloggers have to say about this blogger. This is more for expanding your own perspective than for judging a particular blogger. You may not find anything at all. You may find that many people disagree with this blogger’s thoughts. You may find that people you actually know of–”real” journalists and analysts–pay attention to what this person has to say. You’ll definitely see how blogs encourage conversation and discussion in a way that journalism and traditional industry analysis doesn’t.
4. Remember that bloggers usually prioritize individual authenticity and expression over corporate affiliation. This may be the biggest stumbling block to blogger-corporate communications relations. If you are a PR or AR person at a big company or even a small company and you are reaching out to a blogger, you arrive as Betty-from-ACME not Betty Smith (who happens to work for ACME). In the corporate world, you are expected to express your organization’s point of view and work for it as an advocate. No one questions you if you do that. The blogger, on the other hand, prizes her integrity and her opinions and her lack of beholden-ness to others. If you seem to be insincerely pushing your company’s latest messages, the blogger will sense this, and recoil. How to cross this chasm? With care. Try to approach it person to person.
5. Know that bloggers don’t blog for free. Most don’t make a whole lot of money off of it if any, although a few have figured out ways to make mediocre to very good livings. But bloggers do it for some payoff–for attention, for respect, for access to the latest technology, for the chance to engage with like-minded people, to show off their braininess. If you can figure out what an individual blogger is after and help him achieve it, you might be rewarded with someone who blogs generously about your company. If there’s something good to say. This is all assuming there’s something good to say about your company’s products.

It can be dangerous to try to engage with the blogosphere, but it’s not something you can ignore. Many technologists these days get their main news and information from blogs and blog aggregation sites, not from magazines or corporate websites or newspapers. That trend will only strengthen as the MySpace/FaceBook/YouTube generation comes of age and takes control of our economy.