Integrating Blogs With PR And Marketing

First there was Business Week featuring Steve Rubel in their cover story on blogs last week, complete with full-page photo. That feature evangelizes blogs, exploring the business perspective in quite a different way to other recent mainstream media reporting, and in a far more relevant way for the business reader. Today, the CooperKatz, the PR firm Steve works for, has begun a project with new media services that leverages Steve's Micro Persuasion brand, for which I offer my warm congratulations. It emphasizes the success of Steve's role as a key evangelist in the PR profession and pushing that envelop ever further (for more on that, see the conversation (MP3, 30.8Mb) Hobson & Holtz Report). But, this isn't the really significant news. That news is related to a comment Steve makes VespaBlogs site - a model of transparency - describe how the blogs program will work and what it's intended to achieve, including this explanation on building buzz and driving traffic to the blogs: Piaggio USA plans to execute a small ad buy on both blogs and search engines to support the launch. In addition, since the online marketing and PR programs are tightly integrated, the blogs will integrate into the broader PR strategy as well. In addition, the VespaUSA.com site will link to the blogs once launched. Amongst all the generic info out there about the benefits of blogs for business, and how they can work as integral elements of broader public relations, marketing and other communication activity, it's very good indeed to learn of a real, live example of that integration and how it's planned to be executed. One to watch in the coming months as the plans develop. Links: Steve Rubel full-page photo. Neville Hobson is the author of the popular Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: