Universit� Catholique de Louvain

Blogs: new partners of the Public Relations agencies

This dissertation aims at exploring what the relation between firms/public relations (PR) agencies and bloggers is or could be. There already exist strong relations and contacts between traditional journalists and PR agents but do relations between PR agents and bloggers exist? Why well or not? Can bloggers be influenced by comments left by PR agents? It is all about who influences who. PR agents could influence bloggers to write articles about a specific brand and then readers could be influenced by the blogger and have a favourable opinion about this brand and/or buy its product. Bloggers are the new target of PR agency and a trustful relation has to be implemented in order that both partners, the blogger and the PR agencies, fulfil their purposes. Respectively, bloggers want to attract readers by posting newsworthy information and PR consultants aim at making people write about its clients without paying for it.