OPEN

The UK’s advertising and PR industry trade titles both carried features on blogging yesterday.

Campaign‘s was a piece (subscription required) by Canadian blogger Nancy Vonk (famous for her post that led to the"death by blogging" downfall of WPP heavyweight Neil French) and was a gentle romp through the subject for beginners.  All in all its a good piece, with Nancy batting away cynicism early on:

Yes, yes, yes, millions of blogs are tragic, but many others are hugely
worthwhile. To get hooked straight away check out boingboing.net (strapline: a
directory of wonderful things), kuraoka.com/adblog – priceless as a cheat sheet
for the latest highly relevant ad news and trends.

It’s a shame there wasn’t a UK advertising blogger to do this instead, but it was a good piece all the same. To be fair, I’m not sure that I know of a UK advertising blogger off the top of my head.

Ms Vonk gives some advice for agencies:

Proposing to create a blog for your clients right now should be done
with extreme caution. Agencies are still far better poised to create the next ad
campaign for their client than their blog. The resources required to set
it up and keep it going are huge.

However, the time is right now for agencies to start researching blogs that
are relevant to clients’ products and to tap into this fantastic means of
understanding the consumer’s interest in them or their categories.

I agree with most of that – don’t rush in etc. etc. But I think people would be better off investing in PR campaigns that begin to engage with bloggers as well as media as a way of exploring the potential of this space. Meanwhile agencies of all marcomms colours need to be investing in innovation and developing new communications approaches and services (not something they’re used to, many of them).

Part two – PR Week’s effort – to follow…