New media or knew media

Until now I’d only heard about specialist firms that offered car maker PR departments a way in to the social media scene by ‘reaching out’ to bloggers.

One such PR person told me that whenever they’d tried using such agencies, these new influencers always turned out to be writers already known to the car maker concerned.

This afternoon, I experienced this first hand.

In the middle of writing a story about Honda’s fleet plans I got an email from Aissatou Diallo which read:

Hello Tristan,

I work for Nissan and I am running the Nissan Juke official page on Facebook.
We are organizing a 2-week press event starting from June 30th. We will also invite bloggers and pre-orderers to participate and have the opportunity to ask questions to Nissan and also try the JUKE.
I would like to know if you would be interested in joining us for a day. Nothing is sure for now , but I would be glad, if you agree to send your contact to the PR team.
If you show any interest or if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Aissatou
Nissan Community Manager.

I don’t know if this person is agency or staff at Nissan, but I suspect agency because of the email address not being a standard Nissan one. Which shows two points.

The first is that I’m sure there are social media influencers out there that car makers don’t know, but could (I know Honda have identified a number of these people successfully). However, it seems, form both anecdote and personal experience there are few agencies doing this well.

And secondly, if you’re a journalist and you aren’t doing the social media thing, aren’t you missing out on an audience?