Lets talk about the age old question about the differences between bloggers and journalists from the main stream media. First a categorization. To us there are 3 broad categories of people you can target to generate buzz.

1. Main stream media – journalists, reporters, freelancers, editors and publishers of magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, etc. These professionals are paid to learn and write about news and happenings. Our main competitors including Vocus and Cision (and smaller ones like Burrelles Luce) provide extensive information on over 40,000 of these professionals with their media database offering. Any media database has typically information about the publication, its reach, the beat the reporter covers and the reporters contact information (email and in some cases phone).

2. Blog Networks – Since early part of this decade, online publications that started as small one person blogs such as GigaOm and TechCrunch, now have multiple writers and editors with a fairly similar agenda to the main stream media but a focus on specific content such as startups (e.g. Paid Content) or social media (e.g. Mashable). The writers for these have a revenue (and hence pageviews, readership) goal either via sponsorships and advertising so they are also “pitched” by PR professionals. Some of these professionals encourage and lovehaving their contact information available online (providing an easy way for potential PR professionals to contact them) and others dont like being “spammed” with irrelevant pitches.

3. Independent bloggers – These are the mostly one person industry experts – Some of them love to have people email and contact them about new products and services – e.g. Louis Gray, (disclaimer: he’s helping us) and others feel its spam.

Our customers prefer to have the contact information for all of the folks in our database. We have about 80% of our targets mapped to email and phone, but we are choosing in our present version to NOT show direct contact information for the individual bloggers until we are certain they are not going to be used for sending useless PR pitchesand get blacklisted.

We currently allow our customers to comment on their blogs or news sites, but do offer contact information for the main stream media.

What’s your suggestion for the best way to encourage engagement between these 3 categories of influencers and the best way for our customers to get access to them?