Blogs getting recognised as media outlets in India
Posted on December 12, 2007
Filed Under Blogging for Business, E-Marketing & E-PR |
In a previous post I had written about ten reasons why PR professionals could benefit from pitching to bloggers, including the smaller ones. While many still fail to see merit in the arguments presented, or are unable to find ways to monetise such coverage unlike a traditional press clip, the good news for bloggers is that many companies are engaging with bloggers already in India.
And these range from big organizations to smaller ones including start-ups. During a recent interaction with Arathi Vedantham, Head-Corporate Communications, Yahoo! India, she admitted bloggers hardly figure anywhere in PR plans for most agencies and their clients. “But they are important to us at least, and we engage with them on a regular basis,” she says. Proof of this? Bloggers and online media get invited to junkets by Yahoo India along with journalists from mainline media.
In fact, while covering some conferences in the US and UK recently, I was surprised to see media rooms full of bloggers and online journalists who had been given accreditation by the organizers; print media was conspicuous more by its absence. And such trends are spreading globally, and could well be the norm in India too sooner than later.
Through personal experience I have also seen managers change their attitude from indifference (when they would just ignore a media query for a blog post) to slowly but surely getting more receptive. The key for bloggers to succeed in doing so? Get down to some selling and education for the uninitiated; the ones who start understanding the merits involved get more responsive with time.
So much so, companies who otherwise would have been ignoring bloggers are actually calling them and pitching to them. TechGazing.com has posts covering news and features from many including Fastrack, Mobishare, Yahoo, Motvik, Mojopac, Indyarocks and iTasveer; common to all these posts being they were a result of the respective companies contacting me to write about them. There is actually a kind of a waiting list now as many others want me to cover them too; my limitation is time available to do so, and I do not want a clutter.
The moral of the story: These companies are being smart enough to build relationships while it is still easy to do so. And they also realise the niche audiences these blogs address can often be more valuable than even a feature in a mainline publication; the latter may have a marquee value but may often fail to create even the minimum of an impact.
Like they say, the early PR Pro will get the Blogger worm.
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3 Responses to “Blogs getting recognised as media outlets in India”
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Blogging has indeed become an important PR vertical. Its one of the best vehicals to transfer technology knowlegde to the media and specifically helps for India start up companies who want to spread awareness to masses worldwide about their contributions. Guruji.com, is India’s first local search engine. They wanted to spread awareness through blogs. Blogging is the best PR tool for companies whose target is the end consumers.
Hi!
I am a PR professional myself and working on a book on New Media. Blogs is one of the most poular components of New Media today. And your post on Blogs being recognised as the new media outlet is quite relevant.Must say its a great post!! However, i feel there is still a long way to go..in terms of acceptance of its rising popularity. A lot of our clients are still not receptive to this new tool. Nonetheless I am positive that this will change the way we communicate.
I just read that the government of Italy is now requiring all bloggers to register with the state. And that from a country which was just ranked one of the best in Europe for respecting privacy and being a non-surveillance society!