PR folks quickly figuring out blogs

Eight months ago Dana Gardner of ZDNet found that blogs were back-burner stuff to PR agencies. Today, he reports PR machines are roaring to life on the subject of blogging, RSS strategies, and podcasting.

Like me, Dana finds it easy to get marketing people excited about blogs. Here’s Dana’s story.

I had breakfast in Santa Clara, CA, last week with marketers from two firms that cater to software developers. As the coffee was being poured, they were unsure how blogging and podcasting could affect them, other than as an annoyance … more noise. By the time the check came, they were lining up plans to create their own blogs, to reach out to relevant outside bloggers, and to build new structure around how knowledge and information are created inside their companies. Now they want to reach their business communities directly, so they can better share, through blogs, with their users, perhaps through syndication and podcasts, too. The conversion from blog-as-threat to blog-as-communications-imperative took 40 minutes.

Dana’s story is a good reminder for LexBlog that our best marketing tool is just educating law firms and other organizations about the power of blogs. After a typical 30 minute WebEX presentation, it’s more likely than not we’ll have another client. Once someone understands blogs and how cost effective they are the decision tends to be a no brainer.