I don’t think that traditional PR is going to disappear, but it is being impacted by blogs, and PR professionals are having to learn how to deal with bloggers just as they do with other press and analysts. In the BPM world, few of us non-vendor bloggers are press representatives just reporting on events, but are actually experienced analysts and consultants with opinions that people value; many vendors are including bloggers under their analyst relations programs rather than press relations, since that more closely aligns with what many of us do. In fact, many analysts from traditional firms such as Forrester are also blogging now.

I agree with you that anyone who buys enterprise software purely based on a good review on a blog is a fool. Same goes for anyone who buys enterprise software purely because it’s in the upper right quadrant on Gartner, or because it was written about favourably in the New York Times, or because a consultant told them to buy it, or because it’s from IBM. Evaluating enterprise software requires information from many sources; blogs are increasingly contributing to the information sources, but no one — especially me — thinks that reading a review in a blog is a replacement for a proper product evaluation.

You’re right that the blogosphere can become a bit of an echo chamber after a while, and we can lose sight of the bigger world outside that. However, we are having an impact, and the value propositions for vendors and conference organizers increasingly tips in favour of having well-informed bloggers writing about their event.

Second, I understand your business model and what you are offering to vendors and conference providers. I was just pointing out that vendors have only limited budgets and they will invest it so that they get the biggest impact. In case of the Toronto conference it might mean that they can get a bigger impact through traditional local media instead of a blogger with world-wide readers.

Third: We people in the blogosphere are sometimes forgetting that there is a much bigger world outside and this world is not reading blogs or listening to podcasts. Therefore, traditional PR is not going to disappear, but it will be augmented with blogs and other social media in the next years.

Fourth: I don’t believe that in the enterprise business anybody is buying a software just because of a positive review on a blog. In contrast, enterprise business is still working through personal relationships as it has been for many centuries.

In summary: The thing you experienced with the Toronto conference is something you will experience again. It has nothing to do with people not understanding blogging or a new era of PR, but with different value propositions and different kinds of businesses.

Blogging is becoming increasingly influential, and vendors cannot afford to ignore it since their current and prospective customers often read blogs for information as much as they read the mainstream media. My “real” job (the one for which I am paid) is as a freelance systems architect and designer working for end-customer organizations to assist with their BPM projects, and as an industry analyst working for vendors to create research materials such as white papers or provide consulting on product direction. My blog gives me a platform for expressing my opinions on various business and technical topics, reviewing products that I have had a chance to see, and discussing the conferences that I attend. I’m not paid by the vendors (or anyone else) to blog, so these are really my opinions, and I assume that people read this because they place some value on my opinions.

Many vendors value my opinions, even if they are not completely positive, for a variety of reasons. First, it gives them feedback on where I (and likely others) think that their product shortcomings lie. Second, they can refer my posts about their product to their clients to show an independent view, and their clients will believe it because it’s not a purely positive promotional piece by their PR firms. Third, they realize that publicity of any type, even if it contains a few negative bits along with the positive, is a good thing for name recognition. When I cover a vendor conference, I write a lot of coverage — usually one post for every session that I attend — which in turn drives a lot of traffic to the vendor website. Considering that their only “investment” is the cost of a plane ticket and a hotel room, since I’m not paid to be in attendance (and in fact am making the decision to forgo my billable work for a couple of days to be there, so I’m the one making the investment), I get a lot of invitations from vendors to attend their conferences, and end up having to turn some down due to conflicts. I also receive several invitations a week to review products, many of which I turn down if they are not in my primary area of focus, indicating that vendors find my posted product reviews of value.

Not everyone is looking for a whitewashed, positive review of their product, since they realize that their potential customers won’t believe it anyway. Although the PR people may cringe when I say something negative about their product, most people within a company recognize that it’s better to have someone knowledgeable about the industry making those comments in the context of a balanced review of a product, rather than their customers hearing it out of context from competitors.

As for non-vendor conferences, such as the recent one in Toronto about which most of this post was written, there is no investment on their part to have me attend: all they do is give me a free pass to the conference, and receive some publicity via my blog posts in return. This is true of the Gartner conferences that I attend, as well as the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference.