Week 5 ::PR and Blogging – How to Think About It::

By: Munirah binti Mansor  2009889002

Based on my understanding, the article of “PR and Blogging – How to Think About It”, discussed on the phenomena of blogging among the public relations practitioners.  Web logs or known as blog was existed in the early year of 1990s.  There are no specific definitions of blog but they were principally link-driven where individuals kept on a website.  However, one of the characteristic of blogging is that the blogger needs to keep updates their blog most of the time and this has been said causing a burden to themselves too.  Today blogs came in easier form in which the blogger need to write in the word processing and publish it without any difficulties.


Although most people view anyone can write anything in their blog at any time, but it does not suitable for public relations purposes.  This is because, PR profession requires their practitioners to maintain a good relationship between the key audiences and the organization they work with.  Secondly, one of the PR roles is to become the spokesperson to an organization. Hence, they are prohibited to speak out about their company and marketplace issue without their organization’s knowledge.  Therefore, they should be more careful before writing and posting something on the blog.  In PR, the purpose of blogging is differs from personal blogging because they do not have any freedom to say anything since it reflects their credibility in their profession.  Nevertheless, as compare to the journalists who have editors to help them but bloggers do not, and PR either.  This is why PR blogging uses many hyperlinks in order to help uses to get the sources of information.


Another difference between PR blog and personal blog is purposefulness.  This by means, PR practitioners involve in blogging because it might be an excellent and fastest way to disseminate information internally or externally.  For some people they called blogging as “anti-intranet” because intranets have so many layers of departmental and editorial control over the information posted on them.  In contrast, form a PR perspective, there are few situations in which information is left uncontrolled and this is used by them to evaluate the information in promoting a company’s relationship with the target audiences.


There are several advices for the PR practitioners before they decided to blog or not.  In a good way, they can blog since it is a low-cost and fast publishing tool that might be helpful for publishing.  In addition, the followers can leave comments or ideas at the blog without any obstacles.  Blog has the advantage of speed and this can be beneficial to all the communicators since they can keep each other up without having to spend time to communicate through phone calls, email or face to face meeting.  However, it could be difficult to have everyone start using blog. Therefore, it is important to know when and why PR should start blogging and to use it when it makes sense.  


http://www.online-pr.com/Holding/PRandBloggingarticle.pdf