Using bloggers to leverage marketing and build a buzz

Ok, so we've all heard about blogs and their power to influence opinion. Hopefully, if you're reading this blog, you've got an interest in how to commercially apply this new social medium...one that allows readers, publics, targets, prospects, etc. to give you instantaneous feedback.

So yada yada yada! What does this really mean? What this means is that with the ability to have comments posted by interested publics, your web content has the capacity to remain constantly fresh. By extension, this means the potential to increase the visibility of your online PR and presence also goes up.

On a wider scale, PR practitioners are cluing in on this possibility. For example, as a publicist, I can research a vast array of blogs that exist in the ''blogosphere'' and with a carefully coordinated campaign of emailing the blog authors or posting message responses to their posts, the possibility of initiating a viral marketing campaign really becomes impressive. There are tools out there that allow individual entrepreneurs and association executives the option of doing this work themselves. In reading a post recently from another PR professional well known in the US, it was suggested that one should subscribe to google news via blog posts for leads of where to respond.

While this offers one option, I can't help but think that the process is overly burdensome for the average person in terms of the time commitment required to reach every single blogger who could have enough impact.

At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would venture that this task would be better pawned off to a professional. On numerous occasions, I've used blogs and bloggers as an avenue to promote clients or a cause. Most often rather than not, blog posts are more likely to first appear in media-monitoring search engines. Moreover, a good publicist takes the time necessary to build appropriate lists of bloggers with which a dialogue and relationship can be established.

Imagine if you will, a buzz being developed on another site that talks about your services or what's going on with your website. Pretty exciting, no? What's best is that blogging public relations can often be monitored in close to real time.

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Mark Buzan is Principal and Chief Magnifier in Action Strategies, a full service Marketing Communications, Public Relations and Public Affairs Consultantcy. You can view his website at www.actionstrategies.ca.