Q&A on Corporate Blogging

Over on the PR meets the WWW blog there's a terrific Q&A with Billy McCormac, a corporate PR blogger. McCormac writes the English section of JKL Blog, a weblog started in January 2004 and authored - in four different languages - by members of JKL Group, a Nordic PR firm.

JKL's vision is that weblogs can be used, both internally and externally, to help a company to communicate with its publics. Highlights from the interview…

Do you think that PR professionals should see bloggers as journalists? If so, how will this impact their relationship with the "traditional" media?

The blogging/journalism issue is a thorny one. Bloggers, though not journalists in the traditional sense, do produce editorial content. More and more gadget businesses, for example, are pitching blogs such as Gizmodo and Engadget as part of their campaigns or product launches. These companies know that gadget blogs have legions of loyal readers, so it's natural to include them. Blogs and traditional media outlets, I believe, dovetail each other nicely.

Do you encourage your clients to include pitching blogs in their media campaigns?

We address this in our workshop, actually. Once we begin to see high-profile Nordic bloggers attracting massive readerships, I think that pitching blogs will become a natural part of campaigns and product launches.