What is the ‘underground blogosphere’? Steve Rubel of Micropersuation who came up with the term, if I am not wrong, described it as the network of emails and links forwarded among thousands of bloggers everyday, or in fact every second, in a bid to attract more links and viewers for their respective blogs. Steve talked about how he gets dozens of such mails everyday and the number of bloggers pitching to him in many occasions exceed the pitches from PR professionals.

It’s interesting to note what Steve said about how although many bloggers might hate PR pitches, they themselves resort to big time pitching themselves. Sometime journalists forward him their stories with a hope of getting him to take their stories forward. This reminds me of a PR book talking about how every human being subconsciously does PR for himself/ herself from birth till death.

Back to the ‘underground’, Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration took the discussion forward and wrote that mainstream publications as TIME and PC Magazine are sending him pitches so that he writes about them.

Come to think of it, this ‘underground’ exists in every profession. For instance, in the PR profession, beneath all the talks about theories and strategies and media activities, there is a huge complex network of pitches through emails, telephone calls, and in person sent out to thousands of journalists everyday. Journalists also send out numerous written questions to many companies spokespersons in a bid to obtain opinions and quotes from these companies. Beyond this network between PR professionals and journalists is another network - that of PR agencies and prospective clients. I am talking about the uncountable numbers of client pitch calls made and mails sent out from agencies every day. So what do we call this - underground PRosphere?

In journalism, the ‘underground’ is the network of the phone calls, research materials shared, the interviews, the editing, the page layout, relationship between the journalist and PR professionals or with the editor, his/ her network in the industry, etc. etc.

I suppose the ‘underground’ is everywhere and is an intrinsic and unavoidable part of our existence. Behind every campaign, every event, every activity; there is a network of people, relationships, personal chemistry, politics, development of ideas and strategies among various thinking heads and implementers, and the informal and formal exchange of agreements and arguments.