You blog, and you want to be heard. Part of building a great blog is having access to news, as it breaks, and having access to products for review. That’s where SheBlogs comes in – our core mission is to connect you, the blogger, with the PR pros who want to keep you posted on company news and send you product samples. This post is the first in a series about how to best understand and utilize our service to build your own blog.

As I write this series, humor me as I spend a little time giving you a background on our service and how it came to be (my apologies if the lesson is a bit elementary!).

A History of PR

Although cases of public relations practices have existed throughout history – in the form of lobbying, campaigning, reputation management, etc – modern public relations is a practice that traces its

roots to World War I and early 20th Century America. One of the earliest major “consumer campaigns” was for the tobacco industry, in which PR pioneer Edward Bernays launched a campaign encouraging women to smoke – a habit that was considered entirely unfeminine at the time. However, his timing with the Roaring Twenties and the era of the flapper led to great success, and, since many women of the time equated smoking with masculinity and equality, he titled his campaign “The Torches of Liberty Contingent.”

What does that have to do with me, you ask? Since that 1929 campaign, a field with more than 200,000 employees (in the US alone) has arisen to manage reputations, control media messages, and bolster positive public opinion for companies – both big and small. That field has continued to evolve with the media. From the era of Yellow Journalism in print media to the original “Payola” scandal in the early days of radio, to the recent “Blogola” scandal, PR professionals and media broadcasters (from newspaper reporters to radio DJs to TV personalities to bloggers) have struggled to find ethical balance with one another while connecting to share news and promotional announcements.

PR professionals have been given a myriad of negative nicknames, from “spin doctors” to “flaks” – and as the blogosphere continues to explode in popularity and strength, increasingly, traditional PR outreach methods are being called “spam.” However, throughout history and even today, PR professionals and media broadcasters are intrinsically linked – we each need the other to do our jobs well, even though (speaking from personal experience on both sides of the relationship) each often sees the other in an antagonistic light. Media broadcasters are tired of receiving countless “irrelevant” pitches, and PR pros face ever-increasing frustration in trying to get their clients real, quality coverage.

PR Tools – Then And Now

From the earliest PR “tool” – the press release – have risen a number of tools and services to make the job of a PR person easier, and help them meet the growing demands of clients and employers as expectations for viral press have jumped through the roof. In earlier days, press list databases (Vocus, MediaSource, etc) served as tools for PR pros to build “press lists” – lists of reporters that might be interested in writing about their company’s product or service. Now – with so many media outlets (including bloggers), these press lists have gone from being targeted and refined to being thousands of names long (which is where the PR spam term comes from), and these services largely ignore the blogosphere, including only the names/contact information for the largest of bloggers, while ensuring that even small community papers with circulations of several hundred monthly readers are thoroughly cataloged and included. Simply put, they haven’t kept up with the times or the shift in importance from print media to online media.

Another tool that’s been an integral part of PR campaigns is the newswire. Before the Digital Era, newswire services (PR Newswire, Businesswire, Marketwire) were services that were hired by PR pros to distribute text press releases to newsrooms, where editors would review them and assign them to reporters for coverage. In the modern era, newswires are increasingly becoming tools for press releases to be automatically syndicated to news sites, where they are buried on press release pages where no one actually reads them. Again, the blogosphere as a whole has been largely ignored by these services.

Enter SheBlogs

SheBlogs, as I said before, aims to connect bloggers with the brands they care about most, and with new brands that would be of interest to them. We’ve created a community of bloggers that, as a whole, appeals to the PR community (We currently have nearly 3000 registered bloggers who collectively reach more than 35 million monthly unique readers. Compare that to the circulation of USA Today, the country’s largest newspaper, which only reaches 2 million readers per newspaper, and you can get a sense of the power of our community!). Unlike press list databases, we don’t sell your email address and information to PR pros (we don’t want to promote PR spam any more than you want to receive it!). We’ve taken the opposite approach – - we list THEIR contact information on our site and get it out to you so that, if you are interested in their product or announcement, you can contact THEM.

And unlike newswires, we aren’t aiming to get mass syndication of a PR pro’s news announcement or promotion. Our goal is to get their news in your hands, so that you can write your own blog post, with thoughts, analysis, reviews, and personal touch. In other words – - REAL coverage for their news. Any PR pro who has an announcement listed on our site wants to work with you – they want to hear from you, read your thoughts about their news, and provide you with the tools you need (including product samples, in many cases) to write your posts.

In the coming posts in this series – I’ll go into specifics on each category represented on our site and how to best use the information we provide!