My social media timelines have been packed for many weeks now, with lots of blog posts giving tips on Christmas on a budget, how to get through Christmas debt free, cheap days out for 2017 and the like.Does this mean that everyone in the world is skint?

This got me thinking about blogs and their target audiences; do bloggers have particular target audiences in mind or do they post issues relating to themselves and find that people identify with them? 

Reason this started to churn around in my little pea head is; this week a PR company blogged about a pitch pack that they were recommending, because of the fact that they had found some discrepancies in info provided by bloggers themselves and google analytics data. An exchange between the PR company and the bloggers surfaced, as bloggers were outraged on how the blog had made it’s point by using an existing blogger’s info, although anonymously, without permission as they believed it would cause upset.

I don’t wish to get on my moral high horse about whether they were wrong or right to use the example, as to be honest, I probably would have done the same to get the point across. 

What did make me wonder is every other form of publishing has some kind of KPIs that it must report, either to shareholders or boards, so why should bloggers pitching for paid work not be the same? Should there be an industry benchmark/standard pitch pack to ensure that brands and PR companies are getting maximum exposure for their money ? 

From what I have seen many of these pitch packs miss out socio-economic profiling – probably because of the difficulty of getting such data from web users. However, it is probably something that pitch packs would benefit from capturing from the blogger. 

The reason I raise this is that I have seen many bloggers in their early 20s, who I know from interaction with them, do not have large disposable incomes and from their posts on living on a budget etc do not resonate with having  target audiences with large disposable incomes either – but then they work with PR companies who gift them designer goods, expensive prams and cots, that to be perfectly honest, they simply wouldn’t buy in real life, nor, in my opinion, would their audiences. Are the PR industry not missing a trick here in looking at the actual blogger and their socio-economic background and worrying a little less about DA? ( would say that, wouldnt I).

Just a thought.