Technorati and Edelman to launch a "Blogger PR Survey"

Technorati and Edelman have launched a new survey to analyze how bloggers interact with companies and their products. The goal of this survey is for part of it, to get opinions on best practices for companies wanting more active involvement with the blogging community.

Certainly a good idea and I am looking forward to see the results.... But... I'd like to react on Question #9: If you know a message is sent to you from a PR firm, how much are you likely to trust it on a scale between 1 and 10, where “1” is "not at all" and “10” is "complete trust"?

Although I am a PR blogger, I often receive informations/products from companies that are looking for my "voice" ... I don't think that a message is loosing immediately credibility as soon as he has been send out by a PR firm. My answer is a blogger one, not a PR one by the way here. The most important is how the message coming from this PR firm is formulated, knowing that the target audience must be taken in consideration in the way the message is written. As blogger, I am happy to get informations about companies that are in my scope of interest, but it will be boring to get traditional press releases from them, I am not a journalist. Which doesn't mean that I don't want to be informed. I wan't the sender of the information to adapt the content for me or what I represent. Send me information plus links to help me get additional inputs on the story and let me form my own opinion.

So, my answer to the question is "5", depending of the content, not only of the sender ...;o) How many times are we spammed directly by companies to promote products, often pharmaceuticals or software, of no interest to us at all... ? Would those companies be working with PR firms, then they would certainly not be spamming us... ;o)

Just my 2 cents...

Technorati Tags: Edelman, technorati

Comments

[adam kesher]

I guess comments need to be posted in English on this blog... When I replied the survey, I thought that it was relevant to ask if a blogger would find the information more credible if sent by a PR agency rather than a company. On the contrary, my blogger reflex is to think that I would put more trust in a PR agency than in a company, because they are closer to their audiences, more up-to-date with the trends, and would more speak the truth with you. That's just my idea of it: if companies need PR agencies to counsel them, that's because they know things companies don't. On top of that, since the survey is led by a PR agency, Edelman, I guess their idea is to show that bloggers trust agencies more than companies. C'est de bonne guerre ! I posted sth about this on my blog: http://adamkesher.canalblog.com/archives/2005/09/24/835253.html#comments

[Darien]

I think this was a very good post. I was happy to see that there is a survey by Edelman. I have read a lot of talk about what people want in blogging and what is the standard for blogging. I am new to blogging just this year and I have been wondering what people think about this and how big blogging could actually be in a few more years. I have also thought that this is a great way to communicate and companies could benefit from talking to their customers/clients through blogging. When I followed your link to the survey and I got to #9 I was a little puzzled. I am by no means a PR practitioner but it made me wonder if people really trust the company who sends information or if they are more skeptical of the public relations agency. I agree that the peole who send SPAM probably are not working with a PR firm. I am also agreeing that I think the content of the message is more important. If what is said is directed to me in a way that is easy to process or sparks my interest I would think that I would be less aggravated at the message than I would be if it was a press release or another format that was not targeted specifically for its readers. I think that is pretty simple public relations already, targeting your audience.
Thank you for the great post. I liked the survey and I think it was a great PR strategy of finding what people want with blogging right now and how PR can better accommodate those who want to be reached.