What do PR folks think of blogs?
Blog Relations recently took a survey of 50 PR professionals on blogs - what do they know about blogs, are they a force for good/bad (or neither), etc. The results can be found here. Most of the respondents live and/or work in the US or UK, so keep that in mind - YMMV in other places (Asia comes to mind). The most interesting take away for me was the answer to this question:
Do Blogs pose a threat to corporate reputations? (May tick more than one answer)
44% affirmed that one. My guess is that the "" business was still fresh in the minds of this crowd when they took the survey. The other answer that popped from that area was this one:
It is much harder to spot a crisis coming from a blog than from the traditional media
42% responded yes to that one, and 64% agreed with this:
A disgruntled employee or a dissatisfied customer could use a blog to ignite a full-blown crisis
It's not all negative though - most of these folks agreed that businesses can benefit from setting up blogs - and thus becoming part of the conversation. That really goes back to something I say a lot: Define your message, or someone else will define it for you. That's what these PR folks said in these answers.
Go have a look at the whole thing - it's interesting reading.
Update: As per the comment below, I updated the post to reflect the correction.
Comments
Percent
[Hugh Fraser] September 27, 2005 14:04:08.575
Thanks for following up our survey. I thought I would just point out that the results are percents