When bloggers pick up company press releases, more than ¾ of them distort the original company message, according to research from PR firm Burston Marsteller and reported in Emarketer.
Burson-Marsteller looked at over 150 messages sent out by FT Global 100 firms, and discovered a significant gap between the message and the coverage. Distortion was highest for US and Latin American companies, averaging 69% globally. According to the report, bloggers tended to include “opinions, personal experience, knowledge of competitors and products, and speculation.”
Of course, companies distributing video online, as we encourage people to do at yourBusinessChannel, are immune from these headaches. – A fact noted by the article:
“One way companies can combat the message gap is to make the most of owned media. If companies create their own compelling content and distribute it across social networks, there is no room for such a gap. Bloggers are not likely to simply reprint such old-media items as press releases, but relevant branded content can attract links across Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social web.”