This morning I was at Social Media Breakfast 4. It was my first time to SMB and I have to congratulate the organisers on getting a great crowd. I loved the fact that there were so many people from PR agencies and corporations there trying to pickup on new ideas and network with bloggers. Today's session focused heavily on blogger relations, for some strange reason because the topic was "Corporate Adoption of Social Media", and while listening to the discussions something was bugging me about what was being said. Everyone wanted to find out which were the best bloggers, what bloggers wanted, how to treat them, what to expect from them, and what they wanted to do at events/engagements. It them occurred to me that the reason all that sounded strange was because the fundamentals were missing. No one said: "I engaged a blogger because he/she bought my product, loved it, and blogged about it". This I found quite funny because anyone who's been doing social media marketing knows that to start you need to listen. And if you've listened right, you'd know who your fans are and who you need to impress a second round. I have also noticed that at most corporate blogger events in Singapore, it is almost always the same bunch of bloggers. It can't possibly be true that all these same folk bought and loved Samsung, Sony, Intel, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. To me the biggest mistake a corporation or PR agency can make is to aim for the highest profile bloggers and neglect those not-so-famous fans who have already blogged about them. Not that engaging the popular bloggers aren't a good idea, but seriously, we have to start where it matters and greater impact is felt when one of these fans tells his buddy: "Hey, after buying this product, they invited me to check out a sneak peak of the new model and it's damn hot!" Well, at least that's what I'd go after when trying out blogger relations.