You need to spend a bit of time thinking about how to get yourself found in the first place through SEO and keywords. This is how ‘machines’ ie search engines will find you.

Then you need to prove you were worth finding, by providing good content. This is how you keep your audience, and how ‘humans’ ie word of mouth and social bookmarking etc will find you.

So rather than just putting up a sign that says you’re PR (or public relations, communications, reputation management, or whatever term you prefer), let your action prove your online value.

Write well and they will find you…

As for PR and Public Relations in Google, these are some of the top terms bringing people to my blog. You see, every day I can write a headline that is quite targeted to various seach terms. You don´t realy need PR in your title, but you DO need relevant content and descriptive headlines.

As for Matthew´s list, he has ample evidence now that Dave and I have PR blogs, so now it is up to him if he wants to include us

My point wasn’t really about being a list, more about the keywords you use to describe yourself if you really want to appear on such lists.

I still find the techniques I developed to maintain the PR Friendly Index very useful. I understand your point that lists are not relationships, but sooner or later, if you’re hunting for prominent bloggers for a given area, you’ll be looking at… a list.

Just to prove that I’m not a total idiot (parts of me are missing), I thoroughly subscribe to Shel Holz’s excellent recent post on the nature of influence which, while not offering radical solutions, sum it up very succinctly, with a nice ‘how would you feel saying this to your clients’ illustration wrap-up.

I knew it would be! But you can see how this means you don’t appear in a list that is scanning for just ‘PR’, right? And that, by the same token, you might lack some search engine juice for that keyword?

I see your point here, but what if we prefer the term “communications” to “PR”? Both Kami and I have that in our titles. “Communications” is broader and, currently, avoids some of the negative stereotypes that exist around public relations.

I can’t speak for Kami, but for my part the choice of terms is deliberate, not an oversight.

The same thing happened when AdAge became the sponsor…the advertising agencies began moving in and submitting their blogs; ergo, the dynamic/status changed again. (With a few notable acceptions, such as Micropersuasion, which you pointed out.)

So, in summation I’d say that a list of “the most popular PR blogs” that is based solely on the current results of a morphed marketers/advertising current listing doesn’t hold too much weight, at least for me. And, quite frankly, I don’t know too many people who use the AdAge 150 list as a “PR” resource, anymore, anyhow (if they ever did).

And this isn’t sour grapes, as I/we have never bothered to submit our collective blog to the AdAge Power 150 list…mainly because it didn’t seem targeted enough for our focus/content. Jim Horton’s ( http://online-pr.blogspot.com/ ) Online Public Relations list, on the other hand, was a desired placement, mainly because the folks who read Jim’s blog tend to actually work in…public relations:

http://www.online-pr.com/

And a belated happy birthday; I hope it topped your list of excellent ones.