Mar 09

Network’s ‘blogger charter’ creates buzz among Australian PR and social media community

A post on Network’s blog Fresh Chat led to marketing blog Mumbrella claiming “Network PR has become the first in Australia to publish a manifesto of how it plans to deal with bloggers” and resulted in discussion and debate among the public relations and social media community.

In its post entitled ‘Sydney PR agency publishes blogger charter’, Mumbrella highlighted that, in working with social media, Network treats online outlets in the same way as traditional media, including giving bloggers embargoed press releases and access to review material. It also emphasised that Network believes in transparency and does not pay for positive press.

Network’s blog post, written by Lesley White, head of consumer digital, was in response to recent media coverage over bloggers being paid to promote the TV show Lie To Me, many of who did not declare it.

In the blog Lesley not only outlined the practices Network, a pr agency involved with social media, follows in dealing with bloggers and online commentators, but also made it clear practices that the agency does not follow.

In addition to the debate on Mumbrella Sydney community radio station 2Ser interviewed Mumbrella principal Tim Burrowes about the principles of dealing with bloggers.

“Frankly coming from a public relations perspective, it was heartening to see the amount of interest and discussion this topic created amongst Sydney social media experts and online marketers”, said Lesley White.

“Given that our heritage is in PR and dealing with traditional media, we’ve been following these social media practices and ethics for some time and until this issue arose we had simply regarded it as our in-house way of doing things in dealing with the blogging.

“There have been several bad examples of blogger outreach in Australia over the past year. Often, this was undertaken by marketing or PR people who didn’t understand social media practices, or had a push advertising ‘pay for coverage’ approach. While, as an industry, we are still a long way from adopting a common set of ethical guidelines for social media engagement, the level of interest in Network’s stance is certainly a good start”.

Go here on this website to find further information on the agency’s social media ‘rules of engagement’.