Hans on Experience

Here are the findings:

First, why do bloggers' blog?
Thirty four percent - the highest number—blog in order to be visible authorities in their field. This means that bloggers are highly engaged; seek the best sources of information; and bring a natural desire to participate and advance the discussion in their field. That makes them an important audience for corporations and public relations professionals but they have largely been ignored- 48% of bloggers are never contacted by companies or their PR representatives. According to the open-ended questions, bloggers' biggest frustration is that companies don't realize how influential blogs are, and that they don't interact with bloggers.

The survey shows that bloggers do care about products and companies.
Fifty one percent of bloggers post about companies, their employees and their products at least once a week. Many bloggers consider companies to be trusted sources of information about their own products: 45% think company communications are "somewhat trusted" and 35% think they are highly trustworthy. PR firms could do better: 33% do not trust communications from PR firms, though 21% do consider information from PR firms to be trust worthy. 85% see corporate blogs as somewhat or occasionally trustworthy, and 18% think employee blogs are very trustworthy.

Companies need to participate in the conversation.
Only 16% of bloggers receive personal emails inviting discussion. 41% have no interaction; 20% receive a form email and 15% receive a press release.

We're seeing an inversion of the traditional pyramid of influence - the top-down approach to communications: Senior company executives who blog (yes, that includes me) are only half as believable (19%) as company employees who blog (35%).

Trust is becoming far more personal: bloggers trust information from their peers more than any other source. In fact, they prefer learning from other bloggers by about 3 to 1 (63% to 21%) over hearing from a corporation.

The data challenges the preconception that bloggers are irresponsibly careless with facts and don't care about accuracy as much as speed to market. In fact, 39% of bloggers will strike through an error and correct it, 25% will create a post with new information and 24% will leave the error but add a correction. By a 2 to 1 margin, bloggers prefer to be contacted by email to correct an error, over posting a comment.

What does this mean for PR? I believe that the way we communicate with bloggers will increasingly be central to our success.

The old techniques not only don't work in the new world, they erode trust and turn bloggers off. The way in which we've communicated is insufficient – we've relied far too much on press releases or form email. We need to help companies enter the conversation, but they can only do that with respect, humility and honesty.

Companies must enter the blogosphere in ways that respect its values and norms. We should never assume we can barge into a conversation; we need to ask permission to interact. We must always be transparent about who we are and what our motives are. Communications should be based on genuine understanding of each person's interests and needs. When companies or agencies act duplicitously, we should recognize that they are interfering with human conversation, and we should not stand for it.

From http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog