Judge a (PR) company by its bloggers. . . pointers for choosing wisely
I am often asked to recommend PR agencies to companies. And often I am asked how to choose PR agencies, especially ones that understand a bit about the new media: blogging and the blogosphere.
I'm always happy to point people in the right directions, and to offer some pointers. Here is a key pointer: if you are looking for a PR company that understands something about blogging find out who in that organization blogs, and how long have they been blogging, and what is their blog pagerank and traffic.
You will find that in many large PR companies, it is their most junior staff that are the in-house bloggers, and there lies the rub. PR companies that "get it" have senior staff as bloggers, and they blog regularly, and they have decent traffic, and they also use other types of new media such as wikis.
Understanding blogging can only be done by being actively involved in blogging and the blogosphere. It cannot be understood by reading about blogging.
If you are not involved in blogging you will never be able to "get it" no matter how many articles and books you read on the subject.
I would like to invite many of the good people in the Silicon Valley PR industry to re-read that sentence again and again, if I thought it would do any good :-)
But I can help you in getting started, there are many ways to become involved in the blogosphere, give me a call sometime--my cell is 4one5 threethree6 seven54seven.
