The UK ‘Mummy Blogger’ (I hate that term!) phenomenon has picked up pace very quickly over the past year and the resulting inbox assault from PR agencies must have been quite exhausting.

I just hope we don’t ever get to the point where you guys have to down tools and declare a ‘PR Blackout Week’ a la the USA Mommy Bloggers!
.-= kerry @ digital outlook´s last blog ..flower power… =-.

I wholeheartedly agree agencies need to immerse themselves in social media and for me the very last sentence says it all: “So go ahead, jump in and leave a comment”.

The first step for understanding blogging is to start reading, properly reading, and engaging with bloggers on their own patch. All bloggers love comments and this is by far the best way to engage and to start to understand blogging and to engage with bloggers.

Some other thoughts to chuck into the mix for agencies:

Blogs come in all different shapes and sizes, with some bloggers writing in great detail about minutia, or others short intros to worldwide macro topics and trends. It really doesn’t matter, the point is, you just need to join the conversation and add some value.

Getting out there and meeting fellow bloggers is very important, but you can also stimulate conversation and relationship online by linking to other blog posts and encouraging bloggers to interact. Give it a try, bloggers love inbound links.

You do need to join the conversation. You’ve probably all seen the statistics about how quickly social media platforms have grown so there’s little point banging on about it, but I picked up a great quote recently from Graeme Stoker at BT: “what’s your ROI: return on irrelevance from not using social media” i.e. if you don’t join the online conversation, you are irrelevant. One thing bloggers have done, is join and, often case, lead the conversation on all manner of topics.

Smashing post you’ve written there.