Bloggers are a Public Relations Audience

Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post about how companies are targeting bloggers for PR efforts. Mentions on widely-read blogs - even if they're just widely read within a certain segment of their market - are valuable publicity, and so naturally PR firms are paying attention.

Of course, sometimes it's done very poorly - most of us get those pitches (there's one company in particular that sends me the same one about something about which I have no knowledge or credibility and in which I have no interest) and most of them are just terrible. But companies that do it right - with a light touch and by provided information that's actually helpful for writing about things we want to write about anyway - find it to be pretty successful:

When Nokia Corp. released its camera smartphone last fall, the marketing campaign cut back on news releases and flashy ads. Instead, the company sent sample products to 50 tech-savvy amateur bloggers with a passion for mobile phones.

The tactic paid off, as word spread online about the N-series phone, driving up sales and contributing to a 43 percent profit boost for Nokia last quarter.

"So many blogs picked it up that it blew out our server twice," said Andy Abramson of Comunicano Inc., who developed the blogging program for Nokia. "We were getting thousands of hits per second. When you look at the body of information that was generated around this, we knew we had something very special."

I get questions about blogging from clients, and I usually tell them that this - not launching some dull corporate blog - is the right first step in using blogging as a communications tool.