‘Professional bloggers’ - the the PR people of tomorrow?

Fellow Cow Ella forwarded me on this piece by Fuat Kircaali from Web 2.0 all about how PR people and consultancies are marketing dinosaurs due for extinction.

Sure, the guy was trying to push his Utilizer news publishing platform with a fairly up-front plug in the article. However, it’s this quote that caught my attention:

“Companies with the Largest Number of Professional Bloggers will win. Tomorrow's (and I mean tomorrow, not the next decade) marketing game will be played on professional corporate blogging platforms. The companies with the largest number of well-read and respected corporate bloggers will win the marketing and propaganda games.”

Will the PR people of tomorrow simply be glorified bloggers with brands employing an army of scribes to send pearls of wisdom into the online ether?

I can see some logic in this argument. News is increasingly online first and in print a distant second, everyone is connected, and blogs directly help your search engine rankings.  Nevertheless, I would have thought that the need to disseminate more news online and engage with people means professional (and trained) communicators are more and not less necessary.

So - “The new job description of "professional corporate blogger" will be a very popular one”? Well that depends. Companies like Kodak do have people present in this sphere, but what they do works as they actually add value to customers (in Kodak’s case via a photo blog).

Assembly line blogging where announcements are blasted out however is just online noise, something we have plenty of already.

Image - Barely Fitz

Blogs let in the underwear brands in Saudi Arabia

Think you have a marketing challenge?  Consider then the task of marketing lingerie in Saudi Arabia.  Not only is it strictest state in the Middle East when it comes to 'morality' laws, you have the odd situation of only men being allowed to sell underwear to women - something that has prompted a boycott campaign.

As reported in the latest edition of Middle East marketing trade magazine Communicate, the solution for brands has been to publish their ads online and have them forwarded virally.   

For example, one creative put forward last year by Ogilvy on behalf of Danish lingerie and swimwear brand Change poked fun at the censorship laws in the region, which results in Western magazines arriving with black felt tip marks over images considered too revealing.

Using taglines such as ‘censor anything but the bikini’ and 'edit anything but the bra', the whole body of a model was covered up with marker pens except the hands and face.

The campaign was deemed too close to the bone to run as an above the line campaign, but it did appear as in-store POS material, and went online.

According to Mazen Hassan, creative director of Ogilvy Jeddah, “We submitted it to several local and international blogs, and it was a huge success. Ladies used to e-mail me telling me they really liked it and that they thought it was really smart, because it bends the rules in an acceptable way.”

Essentially the digital arena is one of the few areas where women can get up close to brands with relative freedom.

According to Milos Illic of TBWA / Raad Dubai, which also covers the Saudi market and handles rival lingerie brand Nayomi, digital is a “fantastic opportunity...customers could interact with the brand, immerse themselves in it. They could do wonders in Saudi with digital.”

Working in the Saudi market as a marketing creative is obviously challenging especially if you come from a Western ‘anything goes’ environment, but I imagine it’s one that forces you to think harder of ways to get around the various barriers, with online being key to that.

As the Communicate article says: “With the Internet allowing for more creative freedom, digital could prove a highly effective bypass route for the Saudi advertising market”, and slowly push the boundaries.