Getting Ink

What PR Agencies Should Know About Pitching Bloggers

It's been around five years since I first started blogging. I’ve been blogging here at Getting Ink since 2004, and this year started a parenting blog over at Who’s the Mummy, where I've also been publishing an index of the UK's top 100 Mummy bloggers. As a freelance journalist, I've also been ghost-writing a number of blogs for clients in the technology, HR and consumer sectors.

Despite this, it's probably only in the last six months I've really started getting a lot of pitches from PR execs for blogs, in the same way I'd expect to get pitches as a journalist. My impression certainly is that PR agencies are hugely interested in tapping into the blogging community, but are also unsure quite how best to go about it. Here are some things I've noticed about UK PR agencies pitching bloggers:

• Most PR agencies don’t know one blog from another. So I get a lot of irrelevant pitches, for nappies (my child is four), or crafting products for a photography blog (hmm). Today, I got pitched a recycling bin. I have no clue what blog that was for.
• Most PRs don’t know how to evaluate blogs. This tends to result in companies taking one of two views of blogs. Approach A is the big retailer that said to me this week: “There are too many blogs we need to look at, so we’re not looking at any this year.” Then there’s Approach B, where a PR agency said to me: “We’re just sending to everyone we see on Response Source.”
• Of the 100 or so PR agencies I've dealt with as a blogger, I can count on one hand the number that have asked about my traffic. And I can count on one finger the number that asked any detailed questions about my traffic.
• It’s tempting to assume bloggers are less savvy than journalists. This is a big mistake. And when you start your pitch with “I just read your post on [insert title of most recent post here] and it really made me laugh” it's just as cringe-worthy as when you take the same tack with a journalist.
• Bloggers talk to each other – on social networks, via Twitter, through email and at meet-ups. So when you send the same offer to 50 people at once, it’s safe to assume we know everyone else has been offered the same thing. And if your pitch is bad, people will hear about it. Remember that ‘name and shame’ debate in journalism a few years back? Bloggers are now having that exact same debate - except, unlike journalists, most bloggers don't NEED PRs and don't see dealing with bad pitches as just part of the job, so they're less tolerant of poor practice, if anything.
• Some PR agencies treat bloggers with much less professional courtesy than they would journalists. As a journalist, if I reply to a PR pitch to ask for more info, I don’t think I’ve ever been deliberately ignored. As a blogger, it’s an almost daily occurrence. I’d say, personally, this doesn’t seem like a good long-term strategy. I certainly take down names, and make a note of who plays nice and who doesn't.
• Nobody seems to know whether you offend a blogger by offering to pay them, or whether it’s more likely to offend if you ask them to do something for free. There are some really clumsy conversations going on as a result. Bloggers are scared witless by the stories around the FTC regulations, and there's a lot of uncertainty going on. 
• A lot of PR agencies think bloggers should provide free consulting. Bloggers get sent a lot of questionnaires and surveys by PR agencies. "Would you just fill in this survey, it should only take 15 minutes, to tell us how you like to be approached and what sort of thing you're interested in?" Well, that's all well and good if blogging and working with PR agencies is my job - but the majority of bloggers don't do this for a job (or it's a sideline) so why should they take 20 minutes out of their day to provide you with free consultation? When one blogger replied to a PR agency pointing out that she charged an hourly rate for consultation, she got an INCREDIBLY rude reply that I guarantee that agency would never have sent to a journalist.
• The companies that REALLY get blogger outreach REALLY get it. And they’re building really strong, interactive relationships with key bloggers, that are going to give their clients a massive advantage in 12 months time and beyond. But these companies are still few and far between.

Now for a brief plug: I've decided to put some of my tips and tricks into a new, half-day 101 training workshop for any PR agencies that are interested in pitching bloggers, and gaining insight into how to identify, evaluate and work with blogs more successfully - you can see more details over on the 101 PR training website, or you can email me. At the moment this course is going to be run in-house for agency teams, but depending on interest, I may look to run a public workshop in January, so please drop me a line if this would be of interest.

Can you fake it till you make it?

A couple of years ago, I ran a 101 training workshop with another freelance journalist. We’d met through blogging and the other freelancer regularly commented on this blog.

As the course was starting, everyone around the table introduced themselves. One of the PR execs attending was another regular visitor to Getting Ink, and a frequent commenter. At the coffee break, the freelance journo confessed to me: “I never realised Katie was a real person – I thought you made her up!”

It was one of those moments where you’re simultaneously a bit insulted (you think I need to fake comments on my blog?) and also want to slap your forehead (HOW did I never think of that?).

Fortunately, I’m not usually in the position of lacking comments on a blog these days, and if a blog post doesn’t generate comments, I tend to just think, “Oh, well, I thought it was interesting, but obviously that was just me, then.” Possibly, this is because I'm just too idle to think up fake opinions.

But this week I noticed a blog I occasionally read had posted what I strongly, strongly suspect were fake comments. Call me cynical, but five comments in five minutes, none with a URL attached, look suspect. Especially when the first comment begins with “I checked out your website and I think it looks gr8! Can’t wait to sign up…”

Hmm.

I can see why you might be tempted to post a fake comment. It’s like a positive version of what local government types call the ‘broken window effect’ – if there’s one smashed window left on an estate, more will inevitably follow. So with blog comments, one fake comment might be seen to ‘break the ice’ and encourage others to comment.

Here’s the problem, though: bloggers are a pretty savvy bunch. They can smell a fake comment from 50 yards. Within half an hour of my posting a Tweet about fake blog comments, four bloggers had identified the blog in question. By the end of the night, I’d guess a lot more had identified the site, judging by the parodies that starting popping up on the comment s over at Who's the Mummy? (my parenting blog). As one blogger said to me: “They couldn’t have made it any more obvious, could they?”

It’s not THAT hard to get genuine comments. In fact, it’s very simple. First, post interesting content that people will want to engage with. Put a bit of personality and authenticity into a blog, and I think people will always respond. Second, take the time to comment on and read and link to other blogs. A blog that never acknowledges anyone else’s existence can seem a bit snooty and tends to be forgotten about.

Ultimately, I think blogging is a long game. And if you lose your credibility, especially if you’re blogging on behalf of your business, it’s going to take a really, really long time to get it back.

** UPDATE: The business operating the blog this post refers to has since changed the time stamps on several comments, making them appear to have been posted at different times, and has deleted one comment and posted a new one in its place. Draw your own conclusions from that one, chaps. **

Bad news chaps: Technorati says you're not "good enough"

You might have noticed Technorati has had a redesign this week, and I saw some rumblings on Twitter that Authority figures have changed.

I had a quick look today and saw my own blogs’ Authority scores have dropped from 100+ to zero. None of the blogs have any inbound links recorded. I tried to ping the blogs, but Technorati has removed the ping page. Hmm.

I posted a question on Technorati’s new support forum and got an answer this evening: “We now only record inbound links from the past 30 days not the past 180 days, so your authority score will drop. Also, we don't count links in the sidebar any more, jsut links in the text. Please read this FAQ…”

Which is fine, but running a monthly index means I tend to get some inbound links each month – I ran a quick Google search and found 32 inbound links from October alone, pointing to Who’s the Mummy , my parenting blog. I posted those on the Support forum. I said these were all recent links, and not one of them showed up in my account. In fact, if you search at Techorati.com you will not find a peep of any of the blogs I work on, either my own or those I manage for clients.

The nice man from Technorati said he understood my frustration (ooh, just feel the customer service) but the blogs I listed were not part of the "set" that the new, improved Technorati monitors.

The new, improved Technorati apparently wants to distance itself from the problems of the past by only reading blogs where it can be sure of the quality of the content. The nice man said: “With the new site, we’re putting a much higher emphasis on the quality of the site experience, especially search results, and the main reason our previous search results were so bad is that a huge percentage of the claimed blogs are spam: copying other people's work, reposting advertising articles, creating as many links as possible to target sites without adding any useful content. So we are now crawling a much smaller set of blogs.”

It's an admirable idea, but here's teh bad news for most of you reading this: Technorati thinks you're not worth bothering with. You don't add any useful content to the blogosphere. Yes, I'm talking to you Sleep is for the Weak, Little Pong, View from Nappy Mountain, You’ve Got Your Hands Full, English Mum, Stop Homework, Play and Stay, Tish Tash Toys, Jan Mary, A Place of My Own, Ackroyd House, Business plus Baby and countless others... the list goes on and on.

If it cheers you up, Technorati isn't bothering with any of my blogs, either, presumably because they aren't "adding any useful content". So, sorry about that.

Needless to say, I don't think we'll be including Technorati data in future Tots100 indexes!

How to do due diligence on blogs (and why some PRs are stupid)

It's been a while (well, a week at least) since I had a good rant on the blog. I know, you've missed them. Luckily for you, I saw a post on Twitter this weekend from a blogger, advertising a contest to win some prize or other.

The contest wasn’t news – it’s already run on half a dozen other blogs over the summer. What was news was that this particular blog was running the competition.

The only reason I can imagine selecting this blog for a blogger outreach campaign is if the PR had some kind of RSI-related seizure over their keyboard and inadvertently typed the address.

This isn't meant to be catty. It's not a judgment on how well the blog is written. It's a comment on the lack of research that some PR execs do when selecting blogs for promotional campaigns. I'm presuming that when you choose a blog to run a promotion, you're looking for a targeted audience, a popular blog that's widely read, and one where content is widely commented on and shared online - extending the potential reach.

Now consider this: the blog running the competition is promoting it through a bit.ly link. It takes approximately 30 seconds to discover that the link was posted three times in the first 24 hours of the contest - and it was clicked on just 42 times. Of those 42 clicks, just 21 came from the UK - and one of them was me.

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure the client might have expected a bit more for their money. The blog might be fantastic but it clearly has a small reach, and a reach that is 50/50 split between the UK and US.

This is just basic research, and the sort of thing I use a lot in creating my index of the Top 100 British Mummy Bloggers. But regardless of the sector, ANY PR doing blogger outreach should be doing this kind of due diligence.

I can sort of see how the problem comes about. I met with two PR execs last week, from a children’s PR agency. They freely admitted they don’t have kids, don’t read parenting blogs and have identified bloggers to work with in two ways: responding to bloggers who are using Response Source to request review kit, and by seeing who gets a mention in the newspapers.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

There are a hundred different ways to do due diligence on a blog before deciding whether it’s a good partner for your client – and not one of them is “has the blogger asked for freebies lately?”.

So here are my top 10 questions to discover how influential a blog REALLY is :

1. First and foremost, what does the blog cover? Are the values in line with your client’s messages? No good running a major competition with a blog only to find the blogger is massively critical of your client’s whole industry, for example, or that they work for a competitor as a consultant or copywriter. To see if they’re likely to cover a topic, spend the 20 seconds it’ll take to type “site:http://www.blogaddress.com widgets” into Google.(replace "widgets" with something else for the best results)
2. Is this blog widely read? It’s impossible to know another site’s traffic, but there are ways to make educated guesses. For example, you can easily see how many people use Google Reader to subscribe to a specific blog feed – by comparing different blogs within the same sector, you should get a fair idea which are most popular.
3. Is the blog widely discussed? When you’re working with a blogger, ultimately you want the message to be shared and promoted to that blog’s readers and beyond. So consider – how many inbound links are there to this blog? How many times have posts from this blog been saved to Del.ici.ous? How many links to this blog show up in search results from the likes of Google Blogsearch, Technorati or Icerocket? 
4. Is the blog interactive? The best sort of blogs (in my humble opinion) are those that are widely commented upon – where readers are compelled to join in the conversation, either on the blog itself or via Facebook, Twitter and the like. This is the sort of thing you’ll get an idea of by looking at the blog, but Postrank is an excellent tool, too.
5. Who comments on the blog? Some blogs can become something of a circle-jerk (if you don’t know what this means, don’t look it up, especially if you’re reading this Monday morning). But if all the comments come from the same three or four people, it suggests the blog’s reach might not be as good as someone with fewer, but more diverse commenters. No point sending your client’s messages into a tiny echo chamber.
6. How often is the blog updated? Regular content encourages regular traffic, and helps build a site’s profile.
7. How visible is the blog in search engines? Some bloggers are more savvy than others about tags, keywords and SEO. While you shouldn’t necessarily ignore a blog that doesn’t perform well in search engines, you might want to provide some advice if the blog is going to be running a promotion on your behalf, even if it’s just explaining how to use tags and embedded links.
8. Does the blogger have a good Twitter/Facebook network to promote their blog. Don’t just look at how many followers someone has – after all, you can buy friends and followers by the thousand these days. Consider who the blogger is talking to online – and do a quick search for their Twitter name to see who’s talking back. Is this blogger mostly talking to their mother and their neighbour, or are they in contact with the influencers in the market you’re targeting?
9. Finally, ask the blogger themselves – how many unique readers does the site have? How many monthly page impressions? Where do their visitors come from? What’s the site bounce rate? What’s reader loyalty like? A good, prolific blogger will know this stuff. Mind you, I include this with a caveat, even if a blogger knows, he doesn’t have to tell you this stuff. And you’d be unwise to base any of your client’s budget just on the fact someone tells you they get 10,000 unique users a day.
10. Just one final note: think about what you’re offering and whether it’s of interest to the blogger, and will enhance their blog or not. So, Pizza Express, no, I’m not going to plaster a 300 word ad for your new “diet” pizza (it’s got a big hole in the middle where they put some salad – does anyone else think that’s the funniest thing EVER? ) on my blog just because you offered me the chance to eat one for free, thanks. I think I’d rather shell out the £8 or so and just buy a pizza, preferably one where I’m not paying for a hole.  

5 signs you're a compulsive over-sharer

Cor, it’s great all this 2.0 networking, isn’t it?

Like, I know what music Jed likes to listen to as well as the music he pretends he’s cool enough to listen to, I’ve seen pictures of colleagues parents and holidays and babies, and all sorts of things. I even know what Wadds has for breakfast of a weekend. S’marvellous.

I’ve come around to the idea that for social media to really work you do have to give a bit of yourself to the community. I used to find personal blog posts and Tweets really annoying but now I think people do business with people and knowing a little something about someone makes them more three-dimensional, somehow.

That sharing definitely has a pay-off for me – I have had business leads worth well in excess of £10,000 this year from contacts I’ve made through both Twitter and Journobiz. And I think without the odd bit of banter or sharing of tips here and there, that wouldn’t have happened.

But thinking about Jed’s post about when sharing becomes too much sharing, I realise that I’m a cold-hearted capitalist deep down. Don’t let the Greenpeace bumper stickers fool you, I only share when there’s something in it for me, and it has to be something that’s worth more than what I’m sharing.

Often the “something in it” isn’t financial. It might be a relationship I want to cultivate, a network I want to be part of, or a community I want to find out more about. I take a reasonably long-term view of these things. And in that way, I can see social media (and the 2.0 sharing culture) has become incredibly important to what I do for a living.

But there’s definitely a point at which sharing becomes TMI.

My rule of thumb is that I would never post anything I’d have a problem with my family reading, I’d never post anything someone might sue me for, and I’d never knowingly post anything that might lose me business – either by annoying a client or enabling a rival to poach them.

And, because it’s Tuesday and everyone loves a list on a Tuesday, 5 signs you’re sharing too much information:

1. You name names. Don’t name clients past or present in any blog, Tweet or similar. If necessary, change genders, first names, countries or any other details that might identify individuals.
2. You’re a passive aggressive Tweeter. Oh, I HATE passive aggressive Tweeters. You know the people who post stupid, whiny, non-specific messages like “Really disappointed in a friend” or “I hate selfish people”. Shut up, already. Most of your Twitter followers really don’t care if you live or die, and any concern they express is just them trying to score some gossip. Deal with your issues in the real world, like an actual grown up. Sorry, that’s possibly my Northern side speaking.
3. You’re begging for work. This is a tricky one, but my personal feeling is you should never look desperate for work. Keen, by all means, but nobody likes to think they’ve given work to someone who’s otherwise unemployable. In the social media world, it pays to keep your happy face on and do the pitching behind the scenes.
4. You forget that the Internet is public. If I post a message on Journobiz or Twitter or Flikr or any other open forum, I have zero expectation of privacy. By all means use privacy settings to their fullest, but mistakes are easily made, and it’s better not to post if in doubt. My personal favourite example of this was the guy who took a quiz on Facebook called “How Good a Lover Are You?” and got the result “Below Average”. I know this because he posted it to his profile – where 350 of his clients, colleagues, friends and contacts could see it. I’m a terrible person, I know, but I did laugh.
5. A potential stalker could find you using something like Spokeo. I share a lot online, but there are certain things I make a point of never posting. Or not posting accurately, at any rate. These include: my home address, my home telephone number, my personal email address and my date of birth. I use different email addresses for different services, and regularly change passwords. I’m sure a determined hacker could still do some damage but I want them to at least have to make a concerted effort.

New Top 100 Index of UK Parent Bloggers

A quick post to flag up that there's a new index of the top 100 British Mummy bloggers over at Who's the Mummy?, which may be useful for those people looking to pitch bloggers. Here's the new top 10 for August 2009:

The Top100 British Parent Blogs and Bloggers:

Rank	Blog	Score	Change
1	Alpha Mummy	715	+2
2	Jo Beaufoix	705	+2
3	Single Parent Dad	692	+6
4	The Potty Diaries	671	+4
5	Sticky Fingers	667	+7
6	English Mum	665	+5
7	Petite Anglaise	659	-6
8	Molly Chicken	658	-7
9	My Boyfriend is a Tw@t	659	+11
10	Notes from Inside my Head	631	+21

Details of the methodology and so on can be found at the FAQ over on Who's the Mummy?

So this is interesting.... a new PR blog ranking

I might be a bit late to this, but I noticed today that Cision, the media database company, is now providing PR agencies with handy "top 10" lists of blogs in various sectors including PR, finance and parenting.

Nothing new about a new "top 10" list, I know - but what's interesting about this list is the lack of details about how exactly Cision came up with the rankings. A quick dig around reveals that Cision bases its index - which is updated every week or two - using what Cision describes as a combination of "in-house expertise" and...:

"...an algorithm to reflect two key measures of web popularity, inbound links and traffic measured in monthly unique users. For each blog these elements were weighted to achieve a balance between measurable impact to date (traffic) and likelihood of future impact (links as a proxy for search visibility). The longlist was then reduced down to a Top 50, with each entry re-evaluated according to additional metrics, notably update frequency and total number of posts."

Obviously, I'm not opposed to a good index, particularly given that this blog is in a couple and I write one myself. But I have a few questions about this particular set of indexes, not least how is Cision accurately measuring unique users on third party sites? And what the devil is "in-house expertise?" Doesn't sound very - well - rigorous.

In my experience, the indexes that have most credibility and longevity are those with hte greatest transparency - look at the About page of the AdAge Power 150 for a superb example of how they've opened up the metrics to scrutiny and debate.

Why isn't Cision doing something similar? In my experience, Cision has always been a pretty open company to deal with, and very open to debate, so I was a bit surprised by this.

While it's nice to see the media database companies starting to look creatively at how they can capture the blog sector, and package it for their customers (FeaturesExec seems to be building a blog database, for example) surely we're used to being able to see the strings these days, aren't we?

Show me the money, Mummy

I've been tracking the UK parent blogging scene for a few months now, and one thing that really strikes me is how quickly the sector is commercialising – paid advertising, sponsorship deals, giveaways and competitions are now par for the course on many of the parenting blogs I’ve been tracking in the Tots100 index.

I’m starting to wonder whether the speed of this change means there hasn’t been time to agree on what is and isn’t acceptable when accepting goods, services or payment from third parties.

Following recent debate on whether Mummy bloggers should accept advertising, or receive payment for running competitions, I noticed this page on Violet Posy, one of my personal favourite Mummy blogs in the UK. What I found particularly interesting is the part where the blogger says:

“… compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content…. This blog does contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified.”

I find this a bit alarming, really. Which is no reflection on Violet Posy - I applaud her for thinking about a disclosure policy, and I think more bloggers could follow her lead. 

The problem is that, for journalists, our professional code of conduct (and many contracts of employment) states that any commercial relationship that might influence content should be declared, and journalists shouldn’t endorse any commercial product or service, except their own work. Many media organisations explicitly forbid reporters from accepting any freebies over a nominal value. 

Now I accept that blogging and journalism aren’t the same thing – bloggers couldn’t cover many of the products and services they do without the benefit of freebies. What’s more, most bloggers aren’t journalists – UK parent bloggers have a wide variety of backgrounds and professions, and I wouldn’t expect them to come to blogging with an understanding of the ethics of balancing editorial and commercial content.

But I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of a blogger accepting payment for posts without declaring that commercial relationship. Aren’t you risking your credibility? If you’re openly admitting that you might write about something because you’re being paid to do so, but you won’t necessarily tell me, how do I trust your content?

But the risks, surely, are even greater for PR agencies and their clients. Imagine being exposed as having paid for a series of “independent” positive posts on a major blog. Or if a competing PR agency discovered your agency had provided freebies to certain bloggers in return for coverage of your client. Can’t be good, can it? Perhaps it’s naïve, but I wonder if it’s not time for PR agencies themselves to start considering the issue of ethics and blogger outreach.

Was this the stupidest Tweet EVER? (probably)

The last week or so, I've been meaning to post something about those people who keep doing the Twitter equivalent of pushing a flyer in my face by incessantly promoting their books/seminars etc. You know the ones where you want to reply: "yes, I saw that message the first 20 times you posted it, thanks". But you don't, because, well, you're a coward and you want an easy life.

But sometimes you see something SO bad, SO poorly executed, you can't help yourself. Friends, this is that moment:

Around lunchtime today, I received an @ message on Twitter from someone called Ellen Brandt, saying "I Don't Like What You Wrote. You Should be Stabbed With Stiletto Heels, Have Vultures Eat Your Liver".

Not so unusual for a journo to get that sort of thing - but the comment was followed by a tiny.cc link. Checking it out, it was a link to a blog post, which turns out to be a sort of long and kinda dull ‘humorous’ article about people attacking other people online. It's also the only post on the blog, which is sort of weird.

The article seems to be the work of Dr Ellen Brandt, an entrepreneur and Ivy League educated historian who has written 3,000 magazine articles. Cripes. Turns out she’d posted the same @ Tweet to hundreds of people today, most of whom didn’t really get the joke and thought they were being insulted – cue lots of conversations where Ellen accuses them of having no sense of humour, of not being sophisticated enough to understand her humour, and – best of all – not understanding how the Internet works.

Sending an insulting Tweet with a blind link to your own blog is a GREAT idea, Ellen says, because:

Creative marketing is not "spam." We in Little Media must be creative to compete with Big Media. Interactivity is what makes Internet media different from print media.

Now I’m willing to bet that Ellen’s Twitter feed, blog post and business website (she writes up the life stories of 'ordinary' Americans) got thousands of hits out of that stunt today. Yay, right?

Except it’s still the most stupid Tweet I’ve ever seen. By a long way.

Because at least 50% of people will instantly dismiss Ellen as a spammer and block her from their accounts. All those connections, all those relationships, are now dead. Another significant proportion will have followed through the link, realised it was a bit of shameless self-promotion, and blocked Ellen from their accounts. Or will just ignore her the next time she gets in touch.

And an unfortunate few, who asked Ellen not to send them that sort of thing - well, they got insulted for their trouble. I particularly liked the woman who said she'd reported Ellen as a spammer and was told: "Sweetums. It is OVER. Do not talk to me again."

Way. To. Go. 

I think the lesson we can learn from this is:

• If it looks like a plug, sounds like a plug and clicks like a plug, it's a plug. Don't try and dress it up.
• Don't post links without telling people what they are.
• Don't assume people will get your sense of humour, especially when wishing them physical injury

And most important of all:

• If someone objects to your plug, don't call them stupid, unsophisticated or "sweetums" and ESPECIALLY don't do it online where it's indexed by Google and available for anyone to see for all time.

Me, my blogs and I.

As a freelance writer, I’m increasingly being asked to write blogs for companies that don’t have time to produce three or four topical posts each week for themselves. I’m now a blogger for three different clients, in three different industries.

I find writing corporate blogs pretty fun. It’s mostly short pieces, you can express an opinion, and blogging is a great way to bring stories and posts you’ve found interesting to a wider audience. I really love when you start to see a blog you’ve written gaining traction in an industry – when links start appearing to your posts, and you’re regularly getting comments from readers.

But sometimes it’s REALLY difficult to balance the ‘me’ writing the blog, and the ‘client’ that is ostensibly the author.

Here’s the dilemma: to get traction, I think a blog needs a coherent personality, and a consistent voice. The best blogs – the ones I read regularly – feel like they’re written by a real person. Over time, you get a sense of who the blogger is – the sorts of issues that rile them, what kind of sense of humour they have…

As a blogger for my clients, I want their blogs to have that kind of identity, but I also feel blogs should be authentic and transparent. The more personality I give the blog (which is necessarily a version of my own personality), the less authentic I feel it becomes. When people respond to a post I’ve written about my opinions, and they think they’re responding to my client, it feels a bit dishonest somehow.

I’m really interested to know how other bloggers approach this issue – can you put ‘you’ aside when you’re blogging for someone else? Or should you be open about the fact that the client (or at least the MD) isn’t really writing the blog? If you write a blog from a purely corporate perspective without any personal anecdotes or opinion, do you alienate the audience? Or am I just worrying too much and this is just like writing a bylined article for your clients?