The Blog Relations PR Survey
In August, we invited 50 PR professionals from around the world to fill in a survey about how they regard blogs as a business communications tool. We are now pleased to publish the results which are filed under their own category on The Angel Blog.
It’s a bit of a two pronged sword. Six out of ten PR people believed that a disgruntled employee or a dissatisfied customer could use a blog to damage a company’s reputation. But eight out of ten PR PROs also think that blogs, if used correctly can be a useful communication tool for businesses.
Meanwhile, although 56 percent of PRs say that they have never pitched a blogger, 46 per cent of those same people think that there are already a "good number of influential blogs." Perhaps they could be doing more to get their message out to them.
We focused on PR PROs for our survey because we thought that they should be able to provide a leading indicator of how businesses will take to blogging over the near future. After all, this group of people speak to businesses about their communications strategy on a daily basis. Besides which, the PR profession has taken to blogs in a big way - as is clear from the fact that many are active bloggers themsleves.
It is perhaps fair to say that the 50 PR PROs who took this survey are, in the main, more blog-savvy than the profession as a whole, although the sample does include those who say they know little about blogs.
(By the way, Blog Relations, despite its name, is not a PR agency. Matthew and I are both professional journalists and we are in the business of providing media content, as well as help to businesses with blogs and podcasts.)
While this survey was in progress, two companies, Dell and Land Rover, were both experiencing the wrath of bloggers with gripes against their products. It was becoming clear that both these companies had underestimated the danger from this quarter.Over half of the PR professional surveyed believed that businesses in general have not yet woken up to the threat posed by blogs.
But on the brighter side, a majority of PR professionals also believe that blogs can be an opportunity for companies as well. Overall, eight out of ten believe that businesses could benefit from setting up their own blogs. This seems liks a big number and it certainly took us by surprise. Perhaps it is because so many PR professionals have benefited from their own experiences of blogging.
We’ve managed to squeeze a good deal of data out of a relatively short questionaire by looking at it from this angle and that. It’s all published here in full detail. We hope you find it interesting. The fact that many of those taking the survey were kind enough to leave on-the-record comments has helped us to round out the picture. We hope you find it interesting .
Sorry I am turning off comments because of persistant spam attempts on this post
27. September 2005 at 05:56
[...] Full details are available here. [...]
27. September 2005 at 17:11
[...] Six months ago 42% of PR professionals indicated that they pitched their ideas to bloggers. Almost 60% of them realized that bloggers represent a clear and present danger to companies who ignore them. Business Week points out that this just released survey is six months old and likely already out of date. [...]
27. September 2005 at 18:04
Hi thanks to both of your for your trackbacks/comments.. You are both smart bloggers, because when I published the survey with its own mini-design, I forgot to include the template for the comments form. Ah!
Actually Weblogs works hasn’t quite got that right. The survey was conducted last month. Business week said it would be interesting to know what the figures were six months ago so that we could see a trend.
27. September 2005 at 21:02
Lies, damn lies, and statistics: The Guardian on blog relations survey
Dominic Timms writes in today’s Guardian (reg. required) that firms are “in the dark over blog threat,” according to “the Blog Relations PR Survey”:
Nearly two-thirds of businesses have not woken up to the threat posed t…
27. September 2005 at 21:03
[...] Kudos to Blog Relations for publishing the survey. [...]
28. September 2005 at 05:58
Blog Relations PR survey
Hugh Fraser and Matthew Lynn of Blog Relations have published the results of their recent blogging survey of 50 PR consultants. While the sample size is perhaps not representative of the entire industry and, as they say, skewed towards
28. September 2005 at 07:17
[...] Duncan Riley (a nice guy, considering he supports the wallabies) from The Blog Herald highlights a report from British firm Blog Relations. The survey asked Public Relations professionals to comment on the blogging phenomenon and its effect on business in general. Some interesting stats, but all in all its a pretty weak attempt, seeing as only 50 respondents were included in the research. [...]
30. September 2005 at 06:31
[...] The Blog Relations PR Survey. Technorati Tags: albuquerque Events business pr publicrelations Trackback· [...]
7. October 2005 at 07:59
[...] More: Blog Relations –a “content consultancy based in London”– has published the results of its PR Survey on September 26. I wrote (on September 27) about the fact that The Guardian (free registration required), reporting on the survey, missed that: [...]
7. October 2005 at 08:02
[...] Of course, that’s not the fault of the survey’s authors. They didn’t had the intention of using a representative sample of PR pros; moreover, they stated clearly the number of responders when they published the results, and any journalist reading them would conclude that the survey is not based on random sampling, which is the norm for public opinions polls. [...]
7. October 2005 at 13:29
“although 56 percent of PRs say that they have never pitched a blogger, 46 per cent of those same people think that there are already a “good number of influential blogs”.
Could we write this sentence this way?:
“although 46 per cent of PRs think that there are already a “good number of influential blogs”, 56 percent say that they have never pitched a blogger.”
7. October 2005 at 13:39
DeWeert, thanks for the point. But actually, we can’t turn the sentence round in this case, because it’s 46% of the narrower group of PRS who affirmed that they have never pitched a blog - not of all the PRs whom we survyed.
The relevant breakdown is in this post:
http://www.blog-relations.com/2005/09/26/blog-relations-survey-pitching-bloggers/