O2 has launched an interesting blogging campaign and have deliberately targetted the blogosphere first. They are already getting positive responses from bloggers (see www.prblogger.com)
You can visit the O2 blog (www.o2cocoonblog.co.uk) which I don't actually think is one of the best blogs devised. It is quite hard to navigate and I found it a bit slow. But where they have really scored is with the blogs outreach campaign. The agency researched who were the most influential bloggers in their space and approached then and sent them phones. They handled it really well. For the inside track on how this was done see: http://ameliatorode.typepad.com/life_moves_pretty_fast/2007/08/o2-cocoon-blogg.html
It's interesting to see that the blogs outreach was not handled by a traditional pr company. I think we might see more of this happening. Blogging and blogging communications is a specialist area, you need to have a good knowledge of the technology, the culture and communications to do well in this space.
It was brave of o2 to go down this route and launch in this way and I'm pretty confident it will work well for them. Companies that start early in this space in terms of reaching out to bloggers are probably going to get the most attention because it is such a new field. As time goes on, it will get harder as bloggers get smarter probably more cynical and selling them products and services will be a lot tougher especially to those who are well attuned to the world of spin.
What I like about the 02 approach though is that it underlines that brands have to start having conversations with their customers and traditional media relations are dead more or less.
