Category: Blogging

Enfant terrible of the PR industry

Amanda Chapel’s Strumpette (the Gawker of PR?) is a brand new addition to the PR blogosphere and by the looks of the first post, is sure to stir up a bus load of controversy. And maybe this is just what the cozy family of PR bloggers needed, a storm in a B-cup, sorry, tea cup. Steve Rubel takes a beating in the first post here.

However, infOpinions senses there’s something fishy about the site.

“We all know that Strumpette is more likely to be a fat, fifty-ish, fool of a guy with a gut the size of his ego than some cute PR bunny.”

We’ll see about that. Let’s just say that anyone that registers a domain through Domains by Proxy isn’t exactly starting off with a bag full of trust.

Promoting blog posts with press releases

This is a new and innovative (or weird, if you wish) way of using blogs in PR. Almega, an organisation that supports service companies in Sweden, has its own blog and Almega today issued a press release to promote a blog post. Sounds like the blog isn’t the right channel for this message if you need to support it with a press release, but then again, it made me go and read it…

300,000 new Swedish bloggers in one day

Sweden’s leading online community Lunarstorm today launches a redesign of its member diaries. Lunarstorm is the largest web site in the Nordic countries with more than one billion page views per month. It has 1.2 million active members, including 90 percent of Sweden’s high school students. Members are able to publish texts on personal online diaries and today the diaries are enhanced with new blog-like features. They are also renamed blogs, which means that the Swedish blogosphere (previously predicted to have about 25,000+ bloggers) got 300,000 new bloggers.

McDonald’s is sponsoring the new blog feature according to Resumé.

Update: Urban is not convinced. The blogs are locked inside the Lunarstorm community and are not equipped with RSS feeds.

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More than half of the blogs at Expressen have no visitors

On 24 February, Swedish daily Expressen launched a new feature enabling readers to start their own blogs at expressen.se. It only took a few days for Expressen to exclaim “Success!”, and indeed, they are already hosting about 1,000 blogs. However, these blogs have very few readers. I took a closer look on Friday 10 March, and at 9 PM, only 2 percent of the blogs had more than 50 daily visits. 86 percent had 5 visits or less and more than half had no visitors at all. All the 959 blogs only totalled a measly 4,315 daily visits that day (with three hours left of the day).

Naturally these figures might improve ovet time and it takes a while to build an audience, but bloggers who created mirror blogs on Expressen.se to drive traffic to their real blogs must have been deeply disappointed.

Update: Expressen tempts new bloggers with “an audience of a million”. Via Johan.

Footnote: Only daily visits via expressen.se are counted. Blogs may have other visitors that do not come from expressen.se.

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