"Научный аспект №1-2019" - Гуманитарные науки

Analysis of blogging in Public Relations

Аганина Рената Вячеславовна – бакалавр по специальности «Реклама, связи с общественностью и дизайна» Российского экономического университета имени Г.В Плеханова.

Холод Дарья Дмитриевна – бакалавр по специальности «Лингвистика» Санкт-Петербургского государственного экономического университета.

Фоминых Наталия Юрьевна – кандидат филологических наук, профессор кафедры Иностранных языков №1 Российского экономического университета им. Г. В. Плеханова.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the analysis of the effective use of blogging in public relations, the importance of information technology on the Internet and the development of blogs at the present time.

Аннотация: Статья посвящена анализу эффективного использования блоггинга в связях с общественностью, значимости информационных технологий в сети интернет и развитию блогов в наше время.

Keywords: Blog, blogging, public relations, PR tools, communication.

Ключевые слова: Блог, блоггинг, связи с общественностью, пиар инструменты, связь.

The importance of information technologies is increasing every year in modern society, especially in the media and the Internet. Information technologies collected the achievements of mathematics, economics, psychology, philosophy, as well as electronics. Today, all the vital activity of any person is permeated and filled with huge flows of information passing through the Internet space.

Therefore, without information technology, exactly the same way as without energy, transport and other technologies, neither society nor people can fully function. Using various methods of influence on society, mass media always in one way or another influenced the consciousness of the audience. But every day more and more in the Internet space is actively developing such a phenomenon as blogging, which can have a greater impact on the audience, which can compete with the media, as bloggers manage to process the most relevant information without subordinating it to censorship, rules, and some principles.

Information becomes so pervasive that a person is sometimes unable to respond to various media communications, and in this connection, a comprehensive study of the effectiveness of media exposure becomes especially relevant nowadays. [6] Information resources are formed in all areas today where significant amounts of information have been accumulated, but, unfortunately, not all information is clear and accessible to the audience. Today, many people blog ranging from schoolchildren to celebrities and politicians.

Despite the fact that many people read different blogs or do blog, everyone understands the general meaning of the word, but as it turned out, there is no clear and unified interpretation of this word, we will consider several options for defining the word blog. According to Cambridge Dictionary, blog – it is a regular record of your thoughts, opinions, or experiences that you put on the internet for other people to read. [4] According to websites related to the topic of advertising and PR a term blog is defined as (a truncation of the expression "weblog") a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts).

The first blog is considered to be the Tim Berners-Lee page, where he published news starting in 1992, blogs received more widespread since 1996, but this phenomenon came much later and began to develop in 2004. Next, we would like to consider the types of blogs, depending on the content of the blogs can be: news and specialized. Despite the fact that we often limit ourselves to topics of a certain sphere, a blogger among various messages concerning the main topic can talk about everything he or she wants, because there is almost no censorship on blogs.

Blogs can be divided into the following types: author blog, collective, corporate, individual. According to Google, every second in the world creates 5 new blogs. The number of people leading blogs and their readers is increasing constantly and with great speed. In the network there are a large number of different blogs that are different themes, informative, as well as goals and content. In our opinion, all blogs are interconnected, they are connected to a certain network by discussing the transfer of thoughts or news from one blogger to another.

The totality of all blogs is considered as a single space and is defined by the concept of the blogosphere. The blogosphere is a collection of blogs, social networks for bloggers, readers and services considered as a single community or social network on the Internet. This is an unusually flexible structure that helps millions of users interact, give feedback, exchange ideas and promote them.

Blogging can be used as a tool for direct and indirect product promotion. Blogs are a great tool for PR in any kind of activity. The use of PR services by blogs can significantly change the attitude to the object or its activities. PR – public relations according to Cambridge dictionary [4] is the activity of keeping good relationships between an organization and the general public.

Based on the goals of the PR, strategies, programs and action plans for interaction with the internal and external public are developed. Many retailers have moved from publishing advertisements in the media to advertising on blogs.

More often we can now find promotional integration on the platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. Various companies promote their products and services, stars advertise their new videos, concerts, politicians order hidden advertising. In most cases, advertising on blogs is native and much more kindly perceived by the audience and this kind of advertising costs more for advertiser, but direct advertising on blogs is also present. According to Wikipedia Native advertising is a type of advertising, mostly online, that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears.

Also recently, bloggers began to create better content, for example, to record small sketches, advertisers began to attract the fact that advertising in the blog has reached a new level. Advertisers are attracted by a new approach to product promotion. Bloggers introduce a new kind of advertising of various products or services, killing all the stereotypes about standard advertising that we see on television.

When bloggers remove advertising sketches, they can rely on various films, create videos with humor and irony, make fun of the product, which gives a positive result. People are distracted by a positive and ridiculous approach, while the product remains in the subconscious of the potential consumer.

The main objective of PR specialists in the field of work with blogs and bloggers usually are the formation of the image, ensuring a leading position, strengthening the image and influence, increasing loyalty and awareness. The duties of a PR specialist include not only the development of a PR campaign with the most popular blogger, but also a detailed Monitoring, selection of the most specialized blogger with suitable topics for the campaign. In order to select the right blogger, the PR specialist needs to study in more detail the structure, specialization, as well as the target audience and the involvement of the blog under a certain campaign.

The choice of the blog for promotion must comply with the rule of three R - reach, resonance, relevance, the reach of the blogger, the degree of its loyalty (responses to posts) and compliance with its objectives and company policy.

To identify how effective advertising in blogs is, we interviewed our classmates and got 36 responses. Survey results showed that: more than 70% of the respondents most often come across advertising on the Internet, most of them are neutral to advertising. 77% read and watch blogs, most of them do it every day. 29% of respondents find it difficult to answer whether they consider advertising on blogs useful for themselves. Only 40% found this ad useful. We also decided to find out how effective, according to the respondents, is advertising on a blog, than advertising on other media. More than 45% of respondents consider advertising on the blog as the most effective, as 26% found it difficult to answer this question.

Most of our respondents answered that advertising on blogs can annoy people. However, more than 40: answered that they are not annoyed by advertising on blogs. We interviewed our respondents and found out which advertisement they would trust: 39b5: answered that they would trust the advertisement to a blogger, 26.3: answered that they trusted contextual advertising, 23.7: they emphasized that they would trust the advertisement in the print edition, a small proportion accounted for outdoor advertising and television advertising: 5.3 percent. The final question for our respondents was “do you think that blog advertising is effective at the moment?” - more than 60: answered yes. We asked multiple questions about the effectiveness of advertising on blogs in order to achieve the most correct answer among our respondents.

Analyzing blogging with other promotion tools, such as: contextual advertising, display advertising, e-mailing, search engine optimization and promotion (SEO), viral marketing, it can be concluded that blogging is a modern PR tool to advertisers first. Since bloggers approach the advertising of a product or service with a special approach, people creatively perceive it as something new.

By their very nature, in order to effectively use blogging for other purposes, it takes a lot more creative effort than when using other advertising or PR tools.

As a result, blogging is a less aggressive means of promotion than any other type of advertising; at the same time, the efficiency of using blogging for other purposes will be higher.

The main reason of the popularity and effectiveness of blogs in PR is a new and unique format - bloggers in their posts and videos give their honest assessment without censorship to any product or service in an accessible form and direct speech that attracts the audience.

References

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3. Electronic encyclopedia of marketing [Electronic resource]. –www.marketing.spb.ru.
4. Cambridge Dictionary [Electronic resource]. –https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ru.
5. Lethbridge University in Canada [Electronic resource]. – https://www.uleth.ca/education.
6. Advertising. 1001 advice./ L. DuPont. - M: Potpourri, 2008. - p. 20.