One of the most interesting parts of publishing this blog is seeing the search-engine queries that bring people here. Here is a list of some of my (verbatim) favorites from this week:
If you have restaurants or retail stores as clients, you should know about ShopWatch, a relatively new Denver Business Journal blog that is written/edited by Boots Gifford. The blog covers “openings and closings of restaurants and retail stores, relocations, and major business strategy changes like remodels and major reworking of product offerings.” Don’t bother pitching minor menu additions or holiday “specials.”
The Denver Business Journal has launched a new blog that features many of its reporters, including Mark Harden, Bruce Goldberg, Greg Avery, Boots Gifford, Bob Mook and Renee McGaw.
If you are devotee of social media and its implications for public relations, check out a new social-media specific blog that features posts by 104 West’s Elaine Schoch, Metzger’s Elaine Ellis, Digital Idea Media’s (and MediaOnTwitter’s) Melissa Hourigan, Turner PR’s Ef Rodriguez and me. The blog is called Social Byte – http://socialbyte.net.
Colorado-based public issues and policy firm SE2 has launched its new blog, The Megaphone.
The Washington Post may be bearish on Crocs’ future, but that isn’t enough to stop mommy bloggers from doing whatever it takes to get a free pair.
Inexplicably, the FTC is considering revised guidelines that would hold companies liable for inaccurate statements written by bloggers who receive samples of the companies’ products.
Okay, it’s me. A few of you knew that; most of you didn’t. To those who did know, thanks for keeping the secret. And to those who didn’t know, thanks for not asking around too much. Secrets like this rarely keep long.
I started the Denver PR Blog because there was a vacuum of PR information in Denver, due in part to the shrinking business sections in the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. Many of us wanted to know what was going on in Denver’s PR community, but only knew what we heard around town at lunches or various PR events. My goal with the blog was to aggregate and disseminate Denver PR news and rumors for everyone’s consumption. And to do it with enough of an edge that it stayed interesting.
I kept the blog anonymous because I thought intrigue would drive traffic, which it has done. In fact, the growth has astounded me. I started it less than a year ago, and in that time it has grown from 150 hits a month to more than 14,000 a month. I have done nothing to promote it other than exchange a few links; the growth has been organic, driven entirely through word-of-mouth by you. And I thank you for that.
So, now, the next evolution of the blog will begin, and I hope that it will contain many more voices than just mine. Thanks for reading.
We’re going to be updating our blogroll soon, so we wanted to give everyone fair warning. If you aren’t posting, we will be pulling you out (that means you, Schenkein).
Playing catch-up on a trend that started five years ago, the Washington Post examines corporate blogs, which, depending on your perspective, either represent the ultimate in high-touch marketing or are the scourge of the authenticity that should define online communication. And while we agree with the Post that corporations are increasingly using blogs to help distribute information in a controlled manner, the statistics the paper cites (“Of the approximately 112.5 million blogs on the Web, almost 5,000 are corporate”) are hardly persuasive.
Last month we examined the contradiction between the lip service many PR agencies give to new media tools and their use (or lack thereof) of the most prominent of those tools – the blog. While the results were interesting, they only offered a simplistic quantitative snapshot. What went unexamined was the qualitative aspect. Today, Steven Silvers of Scatterbox fame offered a brilliantly simple post that cuts right to the heart of the quality of blog posts. The Cliffsnotes version: posting vapidity frequently doesn’t get you anywhere.
The bad news? We didn’t make Time’s list of the Top 25 Blogs. The good news? We didn’t make the magazine’s Five Most Overrated Blogs either. (Hat tip: Elaine Ellis at Tracked Changes).
Ken Barber at Pure Brand brought to our attention this blog post. As Ken notes, “It drives home the point that PR people can’t just apply their age-old, journalist-outreach tactics to the online world, especially bloggers.” We agree. Journalists have come to accept that being spammed comes with the job, and usually they aren’t in a position to hammer you publicly if you annoy them. But bloggers are different, so spam them at your own risk.
The amount of lip service public relations agencies give to new media, social media, Web 2.0, etc., is stunning. It seems you can’t sit through a pitch these days without listening to agencies explain how “critical it is to connect directly — and unfiltered — with your target audiences.”
So we thought it might be interesting to examine how many Denver PR agencies practice what they preach even at the most basic levels. What we found surprised us. Of the 32 agencies we checked, only seven had blogs, and even those seven had great disparities in how often posts appeared and how easy it was to find their blogs. So here is the honor roll:
Steven Silvers/GBSM had already found his way into our blogroll, but we will be adding the blogs from Pure Brand, Schenkein, Story + Welch and Metzger because of their commitment to blogging frequently on interesting topics.
NOTE: Post updated 3/9/2008 @ 1:04 p.m.
Denver Public Relations Blog 