About the difficulties to deal with bloggers

Some days ago I received a press release which announced the imminent release of a book whose subject interests me.

The publisher's PR services which have sent me the info as a "blogger" have e-mailed exactly the same information to journalists. I read the news and then I responded that I was interested and willing to receive a book to read it and to potentially write a post about it.

And this is the answer that I have just received from the press officer:


I am sorry, I do not understand. Well, I do understand but I do not see the point. Either the publisher considers it may be worthwhile to educate a captive audience of political bloggers (since the subject was politics) and in this case, they are ready to send the book on demand. Either they are not interested by bloggers reviews and they should just refrain from throwing press releases that are just useless.

I never thought that journalists were bloggers, I never imagined we should assimilate them like members of the press and I even think that the term "citizen journalists" is totally meaningless.

However, markets have become conversations and some bloggers are participating to the conversations on the Internet, leading some topics. In the context of a launch campaign, it often makes sense to send the full materials to a selected group of bloggers.

Pragmatism and consistency are always useful.