Here is an interesting riff on the role the pitch, news and bloggers in the world of information flows. It is a very good read for all the political campaign hacks itching to build blog campaigns. It is also an effective overview of common communications campaign failures and a good discussion of the why (how) pitching is not conversation, relationships or engaging in a way that effectively targets the norms of blogs.
It is not surprising that folks are still feeling around int he dark on how to engage the blog world with campaigns. It is like early ads on radio, TV or the internet. People are still feeling out the limits of the channel. Applying one channels norms to another has always been a disaster. (Radio personalities did not convert to TV and TV stars are not the kings of the Internet.) Pitching or flacking for a campaign in this new world is different. The challenge is to figure out how to spread news and stories in the blog world (set up a circle of blogs, publish the story in lots of places, push it into lots of online places and then comment on it from a handful of blogs, encourage people to modify and distribute the stores that move your message, include private email pushes,etc.)
This is an interesting because it is targeted at corporate PR hacks but is a bit telling about the ideas that may leave wiggle room for advocacy and political conversations.
Technorati’s “attention index” ranks online news sources using a variant of Googlejuice (the more inbound links to a site, the higher the assessed authority). The top ranked news sources on Technorati – the ones most often pointed to by other writers in the blogosphere are, as one would expect, sites such as The New York Times, CNN, BBC News, and The Washington Post.
No big surprise here. All this tells us is that if news breaks anywhere, it’s likely to appear on one of the big media sites fairly early on, and lots of people who follow these sites (or click through from Google News) will point to the stories they read there; either as their prime source, or because they’re choosing to comment on the source’s take.
After the top five, as J.D. Lasica noted recently, things get a little more interesting:
“No. 5 on the attention index is Slashdot.org, followed by Britain's The Guardian newspaper and another community news site, Plastic. This means bloggers are having conversations about items found on Slashdot slightly more often than they're discussing stories found on The Guardian's Web site ... Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Dave Winer's Scripting News come in ahead of the Los Angeles Times ... while midsize online newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News and The Miami Herald don't make the list.”
Bloggers talk about blogs, blogging, and other bloggers. Big traffic blogs get a lot of their traffic from the fact that other bloggers are constantly referencing them. Again, no big surprise.
So if the word-of-web movement of news and gossip through the blogosphere can be seen as an analogue for word-of-mouth buzz through meatspace – clearly setting the blogvines burning is a worthy goal for any flack wanting to spread their clients’ news.
But is pitching blogs a bad idea?
In general, I’d argue: yes. It really is. But then, I should probably confess that I find the whole idea of “pitching” to be an insincere, outmoded approach anyway – in the traditional flack/hack dynamic as much as in the blog world.
