Some smart PR people have seen the light
It doesn’t surprise me that 70 percent of corporations are going to be blogging by year-end – witness the battle between GM and The New York Times over the scathing piece by Thomas Weinberg in which he took GM to task for promoting SUVS and compared them to drug dealers for their $1.99 per gallon gas incentive.
After several attempts to address the issue and get the times to print their rebuttal, GM decided to post the email thread in their blogs.
PR Week said that this might be a watershed of sorts: the paper ran a column responding to the blog postings by GM. And the GM blog posts proved to have legs – they generated more than 8500 page views and got picked up in other blogs and sites like the Drudge Report and Poynter.org.
“It’s a fantastic example of how a corporation can use blogs,” says Mark Hass, CEO of PR firm Manning, Selvage and Lee, a PR agency of GM’s.
Corporate blogs are certainly coming of age as a media and PR platform
