Blogher: linking and talking to bloggers

What did she have to say? A lot of the usual stuff, but it was nice to hear it confirmed from the horse’s mouth, as it where. For example, she made the point that having a blog for your website will drive more links to your site from other bloggers and drive up your Google ranking. The text you use to link to another site is hugely important. The relevance of the links you make matters as well (as Google looks at the whole neighbourhood of links around you, both inwards and outwards, when making its decisions about how to rank you).

In other words, it’s all about relationships, and relationships was the centre of the afternoon session Forget “the” A-list, Find Your Blogging A-list: effective Blogger Relations. And there were some horror stories to be told: mail merged e-mails from PRs to bloggers.

But, strangely, a lot of what is being said reminds me of exactly what I’d look for as a journalist when a PR is pitching me: some idea of who I am, what I’m interested in and how relevant what I am talking about is for my audience. If anything, this session is underlining to me that bloggers who blog about a particular market are journalists. They’re producing journalism, they’re just publishing it using a blog rather than a magazine.

Fundamentally, PRs should treat anyone they want to write about their product with respect as an individual, whatever the medium they’re publishing in.