Doing a survey isn’t easy. We know, having spent a huge amount of time working on our own which we published last week.
Two companies with many more resources than Blog Relations - Edelman Public Relations and Technorati (the blog tracking company)- have just published their own blog survey. They asked bloggers for their views on how they interact, or would like to interact, with public relations companies and businesses.
Richard Edelman has just sent out an email to all of us who took the survey. It says:
"Technorati contacted tens of thousands of active bloggers via email, blog posts and the networks of discussion and links those posts generated. The survey generated 821 responses during the week of September 26, 2005."
Our survey was the other way round. We asked PRs what they thought of blogs. 50 PRs responded, and some of them are quite well known in their field. 22 left signed comments which we quoted (and we verified the emails of all the others too).
Technorati tracks around 15 million bloggers, and there are thought to be many more in the non-English speaking world. Some say 50 million. So 821 replies is just a little drop in ocean. But that’s how surveys work - even during national election campaigns. They are a small sample and the results are food for thought.
I just mention this because we endured some sniping from a couple of PRs with blogs about the fact that only 50 of their profession filled in our survey. One of them even seemed to think that we should complain to the media about the coverage we received, because they didn’t mention the "shortcomings" - which coming from a PR is an original idea.
Thankfully, there are a lot fewer PRs than there are bloggers, so I think that puts our survey on a par with Edelman/Technorati from the point of view of statistical significance.
So here’s a warm welcome to the Edelman / Technorati survey. It perfectly complements our own. Now we have snapshots from both sides of the PR / Blogger fence.
3 Comments
It was a great idea to counterpoint the Edelman survey with your own.
To complete the ‘flip’, why didn’t you ask how bloggers could get exploit PR people?
Ultimately, PR people are merely knowledge-agents, passing ideas from one context to another.
If bloggers want their ideas heard, they should encourage PR people to create aggregated feeds of genuine media interest and offer these out to media.
Which actually prompts another thought. PR companies are ase well equipped as anybody to package up bespoke content-feeds for any spefific community.
If they did a little of this experimentally, their efforts to do the same for their clients might be more respected.
Thanks Tim, It’s a nice idea that bloggers should think about “exploing” PR people. Worth giving some thought to. How shall we exploit them?
It’s a good idea too for PR companies to set up special interest feeds for bloggers, and for journalists too once they get round to understanding RSS.
Your site is exactly the kind of sites which make the net surfing so fun. central is feature of central boy
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