In my previous post I had written about ten reasons why PR professionals could benefit from pitching to bloggers, including the smaller ones. While many still fail to see merit in the arguments presented, or are unable to find ways to monetise such coverage unlike a traditional press clip, the good news for bloggers is that many companies are engaging with bloggers already in India.

And these range from big organizations to smaller ones including start-ups. During a recent interaction with Arathi Vedantham, Head-Corporate Communications, Yahoo! India, she admitted bloggers hardly figure anywhere in PR plans for most agencies and their clients. “But they are important to us at least, and we engage with them on a regular basis,” she says. Proof of this? Bloggers and online media get invited to junkets by Yahoo India along with journalists from mainline media.

In fact, while covering some conferences in the US and UK recently, I was surprised to see media rooms full of bloggers and online journalists who had been given accreditation by the organizers; print media was conspicuous more by its absence. And such trends are spreading globally, and could well be the norm in India too sooner than later.

Through personal experience I have also seen managers change their attitude from indifference (when they would just ignore a media query for a blog post) to slowly but surely getting more receptive. The key for bloggers to succeed in doing so? Get down to some selling and education for the uninitiated; the ones who start understanding the merits involved get more responsive with time.

So much so, companies who otherwise would have been ignoring bloggers are actually calling them and pitching to them. My blog TechGazing.com has posts covering news and features from many including Fastrack, Mobshare, Yahoo, Motvik, Mojopac, Indyarocks and iTasveer; common to all these posts being they were a result of the respective companies contacting me to write about them. There is actually a kind of a waiting list now as many others want me to cover them too; my limitation is time available to do so, and I do not want a clutter.

The moral of the story: These companies are being smart enough to build relationships while it is still easy to do so. And they also realise the niche audiences these blogs address can often be more valuable than even a feature in a mainline publication; the latter may have a marquee value but may often fail to create even the minimum of an impact.

Like they say, the early PR Pro will get the Blogger worm.

- Ajay Jain is a freelance journalist and publishes his blogs AjayJain.com and TechGazing.com. He can be contacted at ajay@ajayjain.com.

Image credit: Labnol.

Tech Tags: PR public+relations india