At last count there were 30 or so PR-focused blogs. Most are well written, informative and rich with insightful musings on how the blogosphere is changing the rules of the PR game.
 
But practical, how-to advice for novices seeking to incorporate this new channel into their PR practices is infrequent and hard to find. To help fill that vacuum, here are five quick and simple ways newcomers can jumpstart their blogging repertoire in their daily PR programs.
 
1) News release “color commentary”
 
Sure, you can get pretty creative with news releases, but you’re still hamstrung by the journalistic who-what-where-etc. parameters of hard news. Subjective assessments of, say, a new product’s virtues or the significance of a new customer win are typically relegated to stilted executive quotes that no one reads.  
 
That’s where blogs can play a helpful role. A dedicated blog launched in parallel with a news announcement can provide the color commentary, context-setting, and customer feedback that aren’t permissible or possible in a straight news release. Because of their personal and conversational nature, blog postings can supplement news releases in ways never before possible. People like reading blogs and are more willing to listen to a blog posting, fully expecting subjectivity in its opinion. And by allowing readers to posts feedback, the blog can engage interested parties in the interpretation of news. Be sure to provide a link to the associated blog in the news release copy, as well as a link back to the news release from the blog.  
 
2) New product review venues
 
With product review opportunities shrinking in the traditional tech media, blogs offer a rich new outlet for standalone product exposure. Product review blogs are popping up like mushrooms in a forest; although the widely read review blogs – like Gizmodo, The Gadgeteer and Engadget – skew toward consumer electronics, games and nifty geek gadgets.
 
However, a quick word search on Technorati or one of the other blog search engines will inevitably turn up at least one blogger who may like to test drive your company’s particular kind of technology. Review blogs for products ranging from software development tools (The Wagner Blog) to Microsoft Office add-ons (Marc’s Outlook on Productivity) to Biblical software (The Bible Software Review Blog) show that no topic is too niche.
 
But tread carefully at first. Product review blogs don’t have the same journalistic oversight of traditional media. Knowing who is legit, who knows their stuff, who you can trust, etc., requires careful research and monitoring of each blogger’s site before you commit your product to their scrutiny.
 
Peter Rojas of Engadget Weblog recently gave this advice on working with product review blogs to Mike Manuel, who pens the Media Guerrilla PR blog:
 
“Any PR person who receives a request for a review item from a new blog should just do a couple of very basic, intuitive things, like start reading the blog every day for a week or two. You can get a feel for how authoritative and informed the blog’s writer is, and if it doesn't seem like the kind of site where you'd want your product reviewed, you'll be able to tell within a day or two, if not immediately. Another thing you can do is a quick search on Feedster and Technorati to see what other blogs are linking to it and talking about it.”
 
3) Turbocharge your analyst relations programs
 
It’s tough enough simply keeping up with changes and new reports from the handful of top-tier tech analyst firms. With the proliferation of smaller, specialized analyst firms who sprung up post dot-com bust, analyst relations has become an ever-enormous timesink.
 
Fortunately, blogs are perfect tools for consolidating this kind of knowledge. Tekrati, for instance, is a treasure trove of analyst relations insight. The blog scans and aggregates the machinations of more than 325 high tech research firms worldwide, which it updates daily. The Tekrati blog posts articles and announcements about new analyst appointments, services and alliances, upcoming events, calls for speakers, and business news. Want to get your CEO on a prestigious analyst panel? Tekrati provides information on how you can participate in peer-level panels produced by industry research firms. It also provides tips, opinions and whitepapers on best practices for working with analyst firms, as well as a news board about corporate PR and agency analyst relations staff appointments, recruiting, services, events and account wins. Tekrati is a must-have tool for any serious analyst relations program.
 
On the flip-side, don’t waste too much of your time pursuing blogs from the industry analyst themselves. At least not yet. Most are simply recycled abstracts of existing published reports dished up as RSS feeds (more on RSS later). They’re little more than a report sales tool.
 
4) Expand PR measurement
 
Measuring “ink” and key messages picked up in the media has traditionally relied on querying publication databases like Factiva and Lexis-Nexis, as well as harvesting clips manually or being a Google hunter/gatherer.
 
As the influence of bloggers continues to rise, blog coverage will soon have to factor into your overall measurement assessments. For example, a recent posting about a Beaupre client’s customer design win on Popgadget, a blog about personal tech products for women, gave a powerful third-party endorsement about our client’s technology which was built into the end-user product. Hits like these need to be counted.
 
Fortunately, new blogging tools like BlogPulse, which bills itself as an “automated trend discovery system for blogs,” combines search engine capabilities with machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover coverage trends in the blogosphere. It provides built-in analysis and trend tools to measure the current buzz about your particular company, product or service in the blogging realm. It also allows you to find out who is linking your news, blogs, articles, etc. into other bloggers’ own blog entries, and in what context. And it measures the frequency of discussion about specific people or specific phrases popping up among the blog chatter.
  
5) Syndicate your corporate communications
 
Blogs equipped with RSS (real simple syndication) feeds provide a great alternative channel for distributing corporate information out into the world. RSS, sometimes called a “webfeed,” is an easy, low-cost mechanism for publishing snippets of content which people can subscribe to. For example, if you regularly e-mail e-newsletters to customers, partners, et al, chances are many of those e-newsletters are getting tangled up in corporate spam filters and never reach their audience.
 
Why not replace the e-newsletter with a blog and syndicate it to subscribers with RSS feeds? Not only does it solve the mistaken spam problem – because RSS is a true opt-in subscription mechanism that operates in a different technological realm from e-mail – it also frees you from the deadline-driven pressures of assembling a complete e-newsletter. Blog content is also shared and spreads more readily between bloggers, giving extra legs to your communications. You can also use this blog/RSS mechanism to alert publics to freshly issued news, new whitepapers and other content published on your Web site.