Blogs are the future of PR : Excellent interview with expert

Excellent interview of Dave Taylor, a widely recognized expert on both technical and business issues, in this morning’s Rocky Mountain News. Taylor may tick off public relations, but he believes traditional PR is ‘dead’ when it comes to companies sending news releases to reporters.

In my experience, the vast majority of journalists want to be Woodward and Bernstein (of Watergate fame). It’s insulting to go to a journalist and say, ‘Here’s your story,’ said Taylor, author of the new book Growing Your Business with Google.

Taylor says businesses can use blogs to get the word out on products and services and, in the process, be found by potential customers . . . and reporters who hate getting stories pitched to them via news release.

This is exactly why lawyer and other service professional’s blogs work so well. The blogs are putting out content on a niche are. The content is excellent source material. It’s why 80% of journalists have used blogs as a source and 40% do so once a week.

Topics included in the full interview:

• Why should a business create a blog?
• What’s good about two-way communications?
• What might be a two-way blog dialogue?
• Should a business post every comment it receives on its blog?
• When might you post a negative comment?
• What’s a successful business blog?
• What’s the biggest danger for a company that operates a blog?

Dave also discusses how blogs help businesses get found on search engines. As he says “In the future, businesses that aren’t findable will be gone.”

Search engines try to minimize their workload by saying, ‘If you haven’t updated the content on your Web site in a while, then I’m not going to touch it, and I’m not going to come back and look at it for a while. But if you keep changing it, then I’m going to be looking more and more frequently.’

Blogging gives you the ability to produce content and to focus on the content. And it gives you a tool that makes it easy to update your site. The companies that are using blogging effectively are typically putting out new information anywhere from two or three times a week to one or maybe even two new entries a day.

I continue to see Dave’s sound ideas and insight throughout the blogosphere. Hope to get the opportunity to meet him and possibly work with him down the road.