MarCom Professional

Text 100 Global Blogger Survey results are in… time to listen

Last week, Text 100 released the results of our Global Blogger Survey which we conducted during April and May of this year.

Over 449 bloggers from 21 countries took the time to fill out the survey and tell us what they think about how PRs interact with them, and more importantly, what they want from PR professionals.

So what did we find out?

You can review the presentation findings in full on Scribd and Slideshare, but I’ve picked out what I think are some of the key lessons from the survey:

Corporations are increasingly recognising the influence of bloggers

About time? Contact with PR agencies and in-house teams is increasing, and bloggers in EMEA and APAC are being held in the same esteem as their North American counterparts.

Corporate news releases are out

Arguably, they were never really ‘in’ and the internet is littered with evidence from incensed bloggers being spammed with press releases. Unfortunately we were told this still goes on and PR people continue to blindly send corporate press releases to bloggers. Take note.

Bad habits from PRs… still

And it seems as though we are still failing to do the simple things like read blogs and understand the content, communities and preferred methods of communication for bloggers. Perhaps these simple mistakes are down to a lack of understanding of the medium and it will get better. But these complaints are no different from journalists’ biggest pet peeves:

Being pitched by someone who doesn’t follow them or read them or know their beat.

A bit of extra time upfront reading the blog or crafting a well thought out pitch will go a long way to building a relationship and understanding what bloggers need and want.

Content

Speaking of what they want, we found openness to the social media release format and we expect to see far greater usage in the coming year.

The format not only provides information in a more digestible format, but content that bloggers (and journalists) can easily use.  Photographs are most frequently used form of supplied content, followed by charts and graphs, and videos. Practising what we preach, here is the SMR we put together for our findings. 

On the whole, it’s been an interesting couple of months and a great process to be a part of.

Our Global Social Media Lead, Jeremy Woolf, who led this project has put down his thoughts on the main Text 100 Hypertext blog in his post “PR folks: Time to Listen – Global Bloggers Tell It Like It Is.” Check it out.

Cross posted on http://hypertextlondon.wordpress.com/