Engaging With Bloggers

The Grim Reaper comments on this upcoming seminar about dealing with bloggers.

Total Politics is hosting an exclusive ‘How to Deal With Bloggers’ training seminar, which will see some of the biggest names in the blogosphere offering valuable insight into blogger engagement.

In the modern media world, blogs increasingly drive the agenda. Stories broken on blogs often go on to dominate on television, radio and in print. And companies and individuals that don’t know how to react to this new challenge will get their fingers burnt (or worse).

Engaging with bloggers is very different to engaging with journalists, injunctions that work against the mainstream media are far from effective online, and negative stories are harder to kill. All told, protecting your reputation and fighting your corner is much more difficult online than off.

Total Politics lifts the lid on what works and what doesn’t when engaging with bloggers, and provides practical advice for fighting your corner online.

As the Reaper points out, some companies don’t always know how to approach us. I’ve been asked to host links and adverts –  even to allow a guest posting. While none of these is wrong and why not approach an online resource and ask, it does help if the approach is made from someone who has done some basic research. The contacts I receive are pretty obviously cut and paste form emails sent out en masse to a wide range of people without any attempt to personalise or to reflect the nature of the material usually seen on the blog. Consequently, they get binned.

Like the Reaper, I have no problem with taking money for writing –  I’ve done it in the past for a print magazine. However, for political blogging, I think it’s probably a bit more difficult as we tend to talk about whatever takes our fancy. Writing on a given subject to a deadline and set word count requires greater discipline than I exercise here. I suspect that this applies to others out there. We are amateurs and amateurs behave differently to their professional counterparts. In this medium, probably more ethically, too.

Sure, if I was approached to do a piece for money that was of a subject matter that interested me, I’d consider it. I’ve written for a motorcycle magazine in the past, so if one asked me to do a piece on, say, motorcycle accidents and road safety, I’d take their money and put a disclaimer at the foot of the page. But I won’t just write about anything and I don’t like ads, so don’t host them.

There is another way to make money from blogging and I think Iain Dale has nailed it. Host a seminar for £225 a head telling folk how to deal with bloggers. That’s a blinder, that.