A new startup in West Palm Beach is hoping to combine the more traditional public relations sector with the new media niche of women who blog. There are a lot of them, and they are likely more active than most of their male counterparts, some studies might suggest.
Seeing the gap between the traditional marketing style of "push, push, push" and today's social media preference for noninvasive, not-so-pushy advertising, SheBlogs.org hopes to fill in and smooth it over.
Julie Wohlberg, founder of SheBlogs.org, says that this noninvasive approach to the blogging community, especially women, is more effective. "What we have found," says Wohlberg, "is that these bloggers who are eager to connect with P.R. professionals aren't being serviced properly by traditional wire services and outreach methods."
Many bloggers, it seems, are interested in seeing products, new ideas,
and emerging technology but aren't interested in sifting through
thousands of boring press releases daily. Most P.R. sites or newswire
services deliver these press releases, whether the product is great or
lame, in heaps every day. In fact, many of them promote themselves by
stating how many they have daily, as if a mountain of releases is
somehow better than a more targeted molehill.
When asked what makes SheBlogs unique, Wohlberg says: "Aside from being one of the first such services to market, we're built an outreach tool that incorporates all of the social media elements that industry innovators like Stowe Boyd, Robert Scoble and others have called for (Twitter pitching, for examples), and eliminates the spammy nature that many bloggers claim to feel from traditional P.R. pitches. We have created a tool that these bloggers enjoy, appreciate, and find useful."
SheBlogs.org
proposes to not only filter the releases down to whatever subject its
subscribers prefer, but to also deliver them through non-invasive
methods such as Facebook, Twitter, a newsletter, etc. This way, those
who don't want every release hitting their inbox can instead use
another service to subscribe or filter.
Several other things
are offered as well, centered around the SheBlogs website: company
directories, contests, and products offered for review. During beta,
SheBlogs.org worked with Gatorade, Atkins, and more, so it's proving to
work.
This more passive approach to getting P.R. seems to be much
more effective online versus the old "flood the faxes and emails"
approach that many press release agencies use on the traditional
media. Newspaper offices are used to getting thousands of pages of
press releases daily and television news is used to the flood of
"clips" sent their way. Bloggers and most Internet news outlets,
however, prefer not to be buried in a mound of P.R. they have to sift
through to find the gold.
So SheBlogs.org may be on to
something here. It's based in West Palm Beach, self-funded and has several
people on staff. A sister site (so to speak) is launching next week as
TheBlogWire.com. It will be a more generalized P.R. source much like
SheBlogs.org, but without the women in blogging niche. Which is good
news for me, of course.
