Blogs & political campaigns, what do bloggers want?

Last week I took part at the 6th International Political Marketing Conference, you can read the full abstract of my presentation: Blogger Outreach strategies and New Media Engagement. It was great to talk with fellow political marketers, and academics, and learn a lot from interesting presentations on the topics of political science and marketing.

I presented on how political campaigns need to engage with bloggers in creating and running blogger outreach programs to communicate with influential people online. As people in new media understand, the argument of Blogger Vs Journalist was raised.

My take is that Bloggers should not be treated as main stream media journalists or reporters. Political campaigns need to target them with new media tools and technologies that have proven to be effective in creating personal links, and valuable in gaining trust from online communities. The campaign should be able to provide bloggers with relevant insightful and bundled information, in order to spark and maintain a two-way communication stream with  online communities.

When a blogger is interested in a politician or a political campaign, he or she would already monitor their website, follow them on social media, and receive a vast amount of campaign newsletters, press releases and media advisories (not to mention the latest information from main stream media websites).

So, Bloggers have all the raw information they need to write a post.

What do they want?

• They want traffic towards their Blog, linking to Blog posts signals that the campaign understands and reads all relevant information online.
• Following from that, they want to get mentioned, for the campaign to acknowledge the fact that they spend time in dealing with certain political issues.
• Bloggers want to grow their internet presence, in maintaining a multi-subject website.
• They want to have a personal connection with the people running the online campaign, and ask questions.
• They want to contribute, not just money or time resources, but provide policy or communication ideas to the campaign or the candidate. Bloggers can be proven to be valuable in proving feedback on online communications methods.
• They want ideas to write new posts and insightful information that can help them put their argument to perspective.
• Some Bloggers want to advance their career, start a online information portal and go into professional journalism. 
• Also, some bloggers want money, in terms of paid advertising, there is nothing wrong with that, but the campaign needs to always follow it's advertising policy in buying any ad space online. 

Blogs are becoming part of the Media and Public Relations landscape. Political campaigns, and candidates,  need to open-up and reach the flow of online information, whilst having, or in some cases creating, a comprehensive communications strategy in implementing blogger outreach programs.