As public relations find blogs useful in communicating effectively to specific audience, PR is now giving a second thought of actually using blogs as a tool for their campaigns.

In the article, New Media, Blogs, and Public Relations, it shows some of the main concerns of most public relations and media groups. This includes how to connect with bloggers and how to use blogs effectively. This specific concern may already sound outdated, but the underlying issues behind them are very important in the decisions of communication specialists to use blogs as part of their communication tool.

The thought of the so-called long tail concept originally coined by Chris Anderson, wherein there are actually few weblogs who have many readers and millions of weblogs who have few readers on their site. Between these two, however, what most PR thought effective is the weblogs who have few readers. I slightly agree with this observation that with few readers on a site, the exchange of ideas and opinions are more focused and significant. It is true in a sense. However, most read blogs too could create the same healthy discussion room.

As for my own observation, it is not a matter of how little and exclusive a blog is in order to gain a significant exchange of opinions between the blogger and its readers. There are high-traffic sites gain participatory readers. I think what makes them good blogs, where there is actual communication, is that they blog boldly. They wrap their thoughts in a brief and unique way. These elements trigger visitors attention, which make them participate in the bloggers monologue.

However, the continuing pull of attention by good bloggers makes blogs for most PR hard to handle when it comes to looking at specific audiences. With most readers participating to almost any blog that catches their attention, it is hard to really target real interested audience.

Another concern the article pointed is that there is no actual correlation between the number of links to a site and the persistent attention of readers in the site. For example, the article says,

For instance, its customary for bloggers to maintain blogrolls - lists of other blogs theyve read and find interesting, or blogs by people they know - in the margins of their sites. However it doesnt necessarily follow that a blogger actually reads all the blogs on his blogroll on a regular basis.

This point is true as much as it is also true that the stats on the number of hits and links are not determinants of audience attention. Thus, the problem of actually looking for real influential sites is very hard to do.

As discussed before on metric tools available on the net like traffic web stats, PR can now measure its effectiveness. Yet, presented with these concerns, I think that PR should not rely on web stats alone. There is still the need to look for other ways to make their campaigns not only effective, but also more accurate.