Presented by Jill Ratkevic of Bite.

Tivo – select play, select 30, select. Not something that Tivo could officially endorse or promote but blogging has gotten the word out there for them.

On blogging and journalism – blogging is open source journalism. Whatever you write will be corrected by your readers. If you readers have a bad experience that you don’t cover, they will contribute this information as comments. It’s based on dialog, not monologue.

On harnessing the conversation – relationships take time, talk about the issues first, not your product.

Pitching bloggers – need to build cred with the influencers by tipping them off with fresh information in real-time for feedback which can then be incorporated into your pitch to the mainstream media.

Traditional PR is about the number of clips. It’s a different world now. It’s no longer about mentions, it’s about results. Jill talks about their client become.com which generated much better ROI from their 10,000 beta testers that seeded the conversation around their product than from traditional press releases and media tours.

Rod Boothby (E&Y) asks – what about the blogging in companies? Are conversations of benefit to companies?

Absolutely. Companies have souls, they have a “nature.” The value system comes from its founders. Some companies are born to blog. There’s an inverse relationship between branding and blogging. Companies that have a strong brand have difficulty with blogging. Companies can’t talk, people do.

Question – How are PR departments handling blogging?

It’s important for companies to have as many people blogging as possible. Need to trust your people to have good judgment. There’s something about blogging that acknowledges the incompleteness of what we know. This is anti-thetical to messaging which is about driving home a point.