During my presentation on Viral Marketing at SMX last week, I mentioned the idea of piggy backing trends to gain coverage for your own product or service. Well it just so happens that we had a perfect example of that just last week, and we’ve finally managed to track down the evidence.

When Bebo announced the launch of its OpenMedia project, I wrote a post about what this might mean for destination sites such as Joost.  The next day I arrived at work to find an email from someone* saying that they had seen the blog post mentioned on Sky News the night before. Following some further investigation, it turned out that Sky News has a show which looks at stories that are generating coverage in the blogosphere (sorry Andrew!) and the Bebo story was one of the stories that they covered in that night’s issue, using our post as an example.

This raise two interesting points. The first is simply that it confirms what I said in my presentation, and also when I wrote about our first few months of blogging & which stories had generated most interest; that is, if you can blog about things that effect the wider world of the consumer, but which have relevance to your own specific niche or sector, then you have a better chance of reaching a wider audience. This may seem obvious but it is amazing how many corporate blogs talk to no-one, and about nothing of any interest, other than a small group of inward looking people.

The second point relates to how ‘old’ media is treating ‘new’ media (notwithstanding the fact that new media is only really new if you’re old). Having a What The Papers Say type section on a news programme is one that is so common it barely rates a mention. But when TV news do these sort of slots they always name-check the papers which have written the stories. Why then is that when Sky News refer to a post on our blog, they don’t do us the courtesy of a namecheck or of showing our header (the online equivalent of a mast-head)?

I would suggest that it is simply the fact that at present, mainstream media still don’t see blogs as ’serious’ media. But of course they’re serious enough to allow a traditional broadcaster to devote half an hour of air-time to covering what they’re writing about.

To be honest I’m just so happy that our story was picked up (possibly because it made the homepage of Google News, another reason in case you needed one to make sure that your blog ticks Google News’ conditions) that I don’t really mind. But now that there is a member of the NUJ who lists his profession as blogger, I wonder how long it will be before a blog takes on a traditional broadcaster or publisher that takes their content without attributing it.

*Hat tip to Mark from Mpora who are actually global launch partners for OpenMedia but got missed off the press release.

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