PNeo

HOW TO: Include News from Third Parties on your Site

David asked: Can we have a section of our blog where we can post links to stories on popular green sites?

Answer

There are several ways we can do this, but we're going to cover just two, the "blindingly simple", the "slightly more interesting", and the "link blogging" approach.

The blindingly simple (RSS) approach

RSS feeds (standing for "Really Simple Syndication") are a feature of nearly all blogs and most news sites these days. What this means is that sites publish a feed of headlines, content and links. This feed can be included in lots of other places. One of these places could be your blog: it's straightforward to include a feed in (say) the right-hand column of your site.

Pros	Cons
Blindingly simple.	Every news source that you link to must be included separately. And you've given someone else the right to put content on your blog; relinquishing your editorial control.

HOW TO: Approach a Blogger

 

Bloggers are becoming an increasingly important part of the media mix, with some of the larger, more established blogs having huge readerships. Mainstream media outlets often look to the blogosphere for inspiration and breaking stories, while consumers are increasingly looking to bloggers as trustworthy "people like me" who can give them unbiased advice and opinions.

However, unlike the press, bloggers aren't under pressure to adhere to a code of conduct - and there are no established practices of how best to work together. Just as you get annoyed by unsolicited telemarketing calls trying to sell you irrelevant products, bloggers and journalists get annoyed by PR pitches they feel to be poor or irrelevant or regard as unsolicited. The added risk for you is that, unlike journalists, many bloggers will happily post about the poor pitch, reprinting the content of you email and possibly naming you and your agency.

Therefore it is important to be cautious and thoughtful when considering any blogger relations programme and to proceed with care.

How long will this take me?

Like any relationship, building it will take time and effort and the more of each that you put you put in, the more likely you are to be successful.

What do I need to know first?

Before considering approaching bloggers you must have already gone through the following stages:

• Created a keyword list
• Identified who is talking about the issues you are interested in
• Evaluated those blogs to find the top 10 – 20 in terms of influence
• Started to monitor those blogs on a regular basis

How do I do this?

1. Read

Even more so than with traditional mainstream media, it is vital that you are very familiar with the blogger, their blog and their interests because as mentioned above they are more likely to react publicly to your ignorance. Most blogs will have a variety of RSS feeds, use these to track posts and comments.

WHAT IS: Social Bookmarking?

What is this?

Remember books? Remember how you used to put bookmarks in them so you knew exactly where you were up to and didn’t have to search through them to find your page?

Online, you might use bookmarks already like this: you find something you like on the web, so you bookmark it. From then on, if you want to return to that page, you don’t have to search for it – you just go straight to that bookmark (sometimes called a ‘Favorite’ for example on Internet Explorer).

Now consider what you do when you give people documents or reports that you’ve read. To bring certain areas to their attention you might put notes in the margins, or a list of interesting pages at the front. You might put post-its in the report explaining why this is interesting.

This is what social bookmarking is, using the web, with all its interconnectivity, to share many bookmarks for many documents between many people.

Social bookmarking takes the approach that, if you share your bookmarks online, other people can see what you consider interesting, and you can find out what other people have bookmarked. To make it easier to share bookmarks, you can also tag them and add notes.