102457 Resource 81698 49412 49412 1126530413664 1126530413664 Controlled PR University event on blogs and RSS feeds

What makes a blog a successful conversation

<p>Flying to the East Coast and back in three days really messes with one's internal time mechanisms! So&nbsp;I am awake at 4 in the morning and blogging.</p><p>About 60 PR people came to listen to us talk about blogs, feeds, wikis and podcasts. One of the abiding themes was that a blog has to authentic and real. It has to speak to the needs of the audience.</p><p>The audience was warned against hiring outside bloggers and/or creating fake blogs.</p><p>For me the most important criteria is whether or not the blog communicates a message&nbsp;that has value for your audience.</p><p>The&nbsp;successful Stonyfield Farms' blogs are not written by an employee who started to blog.&nbsp; They hired someone specifically to&nbsp;run their blogs.</p><p>Earthlink is hiring a chief blogger right now.&nbsp; </p><p>I believe that as long as the person who is blogging&nbsp;takes the time to become&nbsp;familiar with company and the audience, and is capable of starting and maintaining a conversation that holds the attention and participation of that audience,&nbsp;it will work.</p><p>It comes back to the sage words of <a href="http://www.myst-technology.com/">Bill French at Myst Technology</a></p><blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"><p><em><strong>It's not about creating a blog or a feed - it's about creating one&nbsp;they can't live without.</strong></em></p></blockquote><p>We spoke briefly about character blogs and&nbsp;I brought to their attention the case of a company that sells lingerie&nbsp;specializing in&nbsp;plus-size women. </p><p>It is owned by a woman who&nbsp;has&nbsp;a&nbsp;character called Fifi on her website. She has been writing&nbsp;a column called <a title="The Wisdom of Fifi" href="http://www.lovefifi.com/fifi-universe-wisdom.html">The Wisdom of Fifi</a> for years and they write to back to her by email.&nbsp; She has a vibrant conversation going with her audience.&nbsp; Now she is considering&nbsp;blogging.</p><p>Steve Rubel suggested that in order to remain genuine and authentic she should blog as&nbsp;herself, not the character Fifi.&nbsp; She could&nbsp;blog&nbsp;about what she is doing with her character on the website.</p><p>While this may be of&nbsp;interest to other bloggers and marketers it would&nbsp;be of zero interest to her audience. They have an established&nbsp;&nbsp;relationship with Fifi.</p><p>So I don't think we can make arbitrary rules like <em>a successful blog&nbsp;can only be done by an&nbsp;employee</em> or&nbsp; <em>a&nbsp;blog can't be written&nbsp;by a character</em>. </p><p>What makes a blog really successful, genuine and authentic depends&nbsp;on whether you&nbsp;can&nbsp;create a real&nbsp;conversation that has value for your&nbsp;readers.</p><p /><p /><p /><p /><p /><p /><p /><p /> 10 application/xml false blog blogging character blog PR PR University Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Alexa Toolbar) 69.239.86.79 69.239.86.79 sally false true false false true 177676 false false true false false false true 81698 blog blogsite/Falkow/web