The more I re-read the piece the more I think it was just written to give some love to Edelman and their new booklet on blogging. Where was Michele Neylon or Tom Raftery, where was Fergus Burns from Nooked or Eirepreneur James Corbett? I’m not bothered they didn’t mention the blog awards but I am bothered that they didn’t even do a little bit of research into business bloggers in Ireland. There are a few you know.
Mark Cahalane from Edelman was quoted extensively. Hi Mark, I’m guessing you’ll see this blog entry soon enough. Do you have your own blog Mark? Did the Business Post approach you guys or did you approach them for this story?
The SBP piece was inspid, mundane and about 2 years too late. In fact it reads like a template. “Insert name of country this is being published in” and bang it out all over the world. It was irrelevant to Ireland and a downright shame when it could have done a lot of the growing business blogging community.
In fairness it’s a marketing article. if it was penned by Adrian Weckler and not Catherine O’Mahony, then I might be asking those questions. But it wasn’t and I doubt if any of the bloggers mentioned above are on Catherine’s radar to be honest.
In fairness to the SBP they did do a nice piece on business blogging last year in the Computers in Business section. It was only a matter of time before someone pitched it as a marketing story.
Piaras is spot on with his comments
from reading the article, it’s very much focused on Edelman
In fairness, Edelman are a big agency, who are embracing blogging and social media – but i’m a bit surprised from the lack of Irish context – i would bet a “pint” that none of the Irish client roster are blogging, etc
At the end of the day, Blogging, etc is “grass roots”, “bottom up” – this article is for the “top down” thinkers…
A lot of what the SBP contains actually is, erm, marketing pieces. Unfortunately I have to point out that the same is even more true for the CiB section.
Piaras – “not on their radar” is a rubbish excuse. There’s this wonderful thing called search engines. It’s a really innovative concept. Before you write a piece on a subject you do this thing called “research”.
If they’re such a wonderful marketing agency why wasn’t there ANY mention of any of the higher profile Irish business bloggers?
I sometimes wonder why I bother even buying newspapers …
Piaras: An article in the marketing section or the finance section or the IT section, it does not matter. It’s meant to be a quality paper and yet this is nothing but a puff piece. In your post knocking citizen journalists you mentioned how the mainstream media was far more professional and quality driven than bloggers. If a blogger wrote such a lame piece they’d be mauled and rightly so.
This was an article about blogging and aimed at the Irish business market and was supposedly about how there are advantages to business blogging. However it failed to include anything about what Irish businesses are actually doing apart from Edelman Ireland saying blogging was great. It then gave examples of non-Irish blogs. How lazy is that?
Michele is right, a quick Google would have gotten her Irish examples to give which would surely have been a stronger motivator to get blogging converts. Does Edelman Ireland not try their own dogfood?
[…] As Damien rightly points out, there isn’t a single mention of an Irish blogger. Not one. […]
In your post knocking citizen journalists you mentioned how the mainstream media was far more professional and quality driven than bloggers. If a blogger wrote such a lame piece they’d be mauled and rightly so.
How is this lame? Has the Pajamas Media debacle in the US not demonstrated that even there, blogging as a whole has quite some way to go before being able to stand on its own two feet (as opposed to generally leeching off the footwork of the proper media)?
“Here’s a scary statistic: in 2005, US workers wasted the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs, according to Advertising Age.”
Who says its a waste? and also that statistic means nothing maybe those same workers spend 651,000 years reading newspapers, any figure can be stated with multiple zeros if the sample is large enough.
Look there’s been plenty of pieces on business blogging that haven’t mentioned any Irish business bloggers in other Irish publications. This is effectively a piece about Edelman, there is typically an article about a PR, Marketing or Advertising agency in the SBP marketing setion. I honestly wouldn’t lose much sleep over it.
If anyone’s interested, Edelman’s own blog is here:
http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/
PR-speak that made my morning: “I have never used my blog as a means of self promotion or hyping our firm.” Except that (of course) every post on it is promotion of Edelman and his firm.
I understand that the SBP is laden down with puff pieces for various companies but that doesn’t justify the poor coverage of firms besides Edelman. I guess my main problem with the piece is that, like several articles in the same publication, I feel it doesn’t put a fair and accurate picture of technology utilisation across and will therefore mislead readers. Many of the readers of the SBP computer section are business people who trust it to provide them with the knowledge necessary to identify technology improvements for their business and the copmanies who can deliver them . Many will have to take the information presented at face value.
I’ve had to stop reading the SBP’s Computers_In_Business supplement for health reasons (bad for the ol’ blood pressure).
I got sick of reading puff pieces on self-appointed ‘thought leaders’ (is there any other kind) and ‘strategic partnerships’ between IT supplier X and IT supplier Y (insert group suit photo). CiB is all PR masquerading as news.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28900
There. That feels better. (I guess Sxoop Technologies won’t be featured anytime soon in CiB).
EWI, Thank you for posting Edelman’s own blog. It’s just what I was looking for. I read the latest piece and it seemed an ordinary bit of interesting ideas. You are tough. You say that every post is a promotion, and you are surely right. I am promoting myself and my brand by writing this post. But if I were to write “you can find the best writing on this topic by visiting my blog…” that would be hyping wouldn’t it?
“In the past two years alone, trust in a ‘person like you’ as a source of information has doubled,” the report states.
I love the way they can measure things such as “trust in a ‘person like you'”!
You are tough. You say that every post is a promotion, and you are surely right.
My beef is with Edelman’s claim otherwise, which is a laughable example (of the kind of PR-mummery being criticised in this blog post) that I just happened to pull on a whim.
This substitution of PR-speak for actual news and analysis is a damning trend in the Irish IT press (I can think of other publications who are just as guilty of it).
The role of Public Relations in damaging the necessary trust relationships within society (by promoting the routine use of half-lies and outright falsehoods by those in authority) is a phenomenon which greatly worries me as a concerned citizen, and I think has gone uncommented-on for far too long.
Looked like a quickly rewritten press release to me. But then I tend to be rather cynical about the conventional media’s coverage of anything technological.
I eventually got round to reading the SBP feature on Blogging.
I should admit that I have only recently returned to Ireland after 30 years in UK. I haven’t keep in touch with the Irish IT press, so I come to this piece on blogging with a limited perspective.
Only last week the Financial Times weekend magazine published a 6 page article on blogging: it was based on US material. (I’ve written about this on my blog.) Now this Irish one based on non-Irish material. What’s going on?
Maybe it’s a way of capturing readers’ attention: write about exotic views.
I feel a bit of perspective is needed: so few people in Ireland know what a blog is, so few people are blogging, that any publicity for blogging is good publicity at this stage. The informed debate among early adopters can contuinue regardless.
Now I want to get the Edelman booklet. Now I’ve read Edelman’s blog. Now I’ve found Irish bloggers who know good business blogs.
Yes, people like me read the SBP to keep abreast with how business in developing in Ireland. Yes we’d like to believe what we read but we don’t and that doesn’t matter – so long as it is well written.
A well written article that misinforms the reader is still factually inaccurate but more persuasive. I guess what surprised anyone who knows about blogging was that Edelman would be singled out as anything special. That’s not an insult to Edelman, just an assertion based on a knowledge of some of the best business blogs in Ireland, of which there are many. Still, regaining perspective, it’s a good thing they wrote the article at all.
This is exactly why business blogs are so important – because newspapers only tell half the story!