PR on the blogging tip....

Search Engine Blogs as Public Relations Tools

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Blogs are used for various reasons including reporting news, communicating with specific groups of readers, and spamming. With millions of active blogs being constantly launched by journalists, students, CEO’s and celebrities, the blog can be seen as a living and breathing ecosystem dependent on links, trackbacks, databases, feeds, and indexing for survival. Over the past year Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves; the un-argued big four in search, have launched their own blogs.

What started as a way to say hello to their users has now transformed into a cult of transparency and communications. Along with a dash of geek-speak, crisis management and pro-active posting, these blogs have also begun to outshine the traditional forms of press and public relations, as the press and public has become as non-traditional and non-linear as the blogosphere itself.

The new public relations model of the search blog brings with it a change in attitude and information. No longer are journalists and bloggers pitched as often by Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN by the boilerplate press release, which is usually as damn interesting as reading the back of spray cans.

Instead, the new form of communication is an oxymoron; mass intimacy. Instead of one of our favorite PR reps contacting us with those old releases, we’re now contacted via email or IM with a link to the newest blog post. And if we subscribe to the RSS feeds of these blogs, we’re instantly contacted by our aggregator before the search engine PR people can say “PRISA” three times.

Additionally, Yahoo has taken a more intimate approach to announcing new product offerings from Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and Y Search Marketing on the Yahoo Search Blog They have not used the Y Search Blog as a way to respond to the controversies which have been dogging Yahoo over the summer (China Journalists, Spyware and YSM Crashing) but what they have done is used it as a channel to explain what Yahoo is working on and Yahoo’s direction in Search, Maps and Local; instead of simply announcing. Unlike the Google Blog, the Y Search Blog offers comments, which lets readers send feedback directly to the authors of the blog entries – non-PR affiliated Yahoo employees.

So there you have it, with the convienience of the web benefiting public relations practitioners a whole new level of communication is possible

I’m not a Public Relations specialist but I do pay attention to the PR industry and its trends and do truly feel that the Search Blogs used by the big four search engines are a successful model for some companies, especially tech friendly ones to follow. One of the greatest aspects of reading these entries, is that I already feel like I sort of know these people . Such a feeling of company to public relations is quite priceless.