Wanted: Someone Who Gets It

by Deb Ng

Warning: Brief rant up ahead.

The other day I had a frustrating talk with someone about building community around a website. He’s going for celebrities and shock value rather than reach out to bloggers and social media, even though the bloggers and social media experts embraced the business early on. He called bloggers “amateur hour.” (Hint: Don’t wonder why no one is blogging about you, if you dismiss bloggers as amateurs.) I submit we can give you something the expensive, hot shot P. R. firms can’t.

Now that more businesses are looking to build up community and need to create a web presence, old school bloggers, especially those who are consulting or working outside the blogosphere, are going to run into more of this. I get that. But I wish more folks would at least try and understand what we do and why we do it.

Here’s the thing, if you’re going to hire me as someone to help you liase with bloggers, don’t ask me to hug them one minute and insult them the next. You can’t have it both ways. We’re not just here you need someone to write about you. Visit our blogs, talk with us on Twitter, seek us out at conferences…and you’ll find that we have a lot to offer. Bloggers create buzz around products, offer how-to’s and tools for making things work and foster community. Moreover, if we think a product, or the people behind a product suck, we’re the one’s who will write about it in a negative manner.

If you hire a blogger to help create a community, build up your brand, and give you a web presence, hear us out. Some of us know what we’re talking about or we wouldn’t have made it this far.

That is all…