In preparation for my seminar for the IIA I’ve spent some time investigating Irish business blogs and bloggers.
Strangely enough today’s Sunday Business Post also carries a piece on business blogging:
Firms woo the blog generation
Wow! That’s great. I may be able to pick up some nice bits and pieces to add to my seminar.
Oh how wrong could I have been.
As Damien rightly points out, there isn’t a single mention of an Irish blogger. Not one.
A quick search of Google would have returned several pertinent links.
Would it be unfair to say this was lazy journalism?
I don’t think so.
If it was advertorial for a particular company then it should have been labelled clearly as such.
Any argument about it being “a marketing article” is rubbish. If you want to use blogs for marketing then you should at least be capable of doing a quick search to see if anyone is actually doing it already.
Finding Irish Business Bloggers
If you read the marketing section in the SBP on a regular basis, you will see that they regularly feature an article on a PR, Marketing or Advertising agency.
And your point is what exactly?
Regular pieces should be badly written?
Edelman obviously put the piece forward and hence the focus on them. I wouldn’t get too wound up about it really. The SBP have already done a piece on Irish business bloggers, so some names would easily have been accessible, but the majority of articles on blogs in Irish publications don’t seem to feature Irish examples.
There’s numerous articles out there in any section of the paper that focus on a particular company or don’t mention competitors. It just happens.
So basically you are going to defend a piece that you think is by a marketing / PR firm even if it fails to even follow any logic or display relevance to its target market?
Nope, it obviously could have been better. I just wouldn’t get that wound up about it. Are we going to post something everytime an Irish publication publishes something about blogs and doesn’t give an Irish context? If so I have a bit of catching up to do as I still have a few clippings lying around of previous articles from the last six months.
I don’t necessarily think that an Irish context has to be highlighted in each article though – I thought the piece in the Irish Times Business section last Friday on financial blogs was very good. No mention of the likes of SSIAWatch in it though.
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