Brands are increasingly trying to influence bloggers, but most are getting it badly wrong. Take two recent high-profile incidents – Mike Butcher was asked to do something completely off-topic, and one company couldn't even get Greg Verdino's name right. So what's the right way to go about it?

Steve Rubel, who's also been on the receiving end, thinks that:

To thrive in this new distributed environment, the PR community must step out in front of the curtain, become a bit more technically adept and participate transparently as individuals in online communities. We will have to openly collaborate and add value to the network and help the companies we represent do exactly the same.

Jonathan Trenn has some good advice:

1. Get to know the bloggers, what they write about, and their readership before you contact them. Just like you would do with a reporter. Take a look at their style, their approach to their readers. How much they interact with them and how much the readers interact with the blogger. Is a community developing…meaning do the readers comment to both to the blogger and to one another? Does the blogger respond and develop ties to his or her readership?
2. Remember that it starts with the client company and ends with the blogger audience. In running a campaign or a multi-faceted series of campaigns, you’ll have to pick bloggers who not only blog about related issues to the product but can understand that, by accepting the offer of receiving free goods, can then, in turn blog about it in a way that educates their readership. That last point is important because the blogger should realize that it’s now their role to educate their audiences about the plusses and minuses of the product.
3. Fully explain to the blogger why they were chosen (they carry influence), what the program is about (product loan, blogger usage, product review), and what is expected of them (which I’ll get into a bit). This way the blogger will be able to make a better decision as to whether or not they want to get involved. They’ll understand their role and what’s expected of them. And they’ll understand what they’ll owe their own audience and yes, what they owe the client company – and the marketing company.
4. Provide the blogger as much info as they need about the product. Features, benefits, what’s new about this new model. Train them how to use the product if need be. In others, develop educated users who can then intelligently blog about their experiences.

Rohit Bhargava also has some good tips and Roberta Rosenberg shares a positive experience of blogger outreach done well, and has a few tips of her own.

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We all know building accessible websites is important, and that there's legislation* and corporate guidelines that enforce it. However, have you ever wondered what it's actually like for the target audience?

NMA interviewed a cross-section of disabled people to discover how digital media fit into their lives and how accessibility problems affect them.

Mark is 55 and has a son aged 15. He works with access technology for blind and partially sighted people at the Royal National Institute of the Blind. He is blind.

Brands that do it for me include Wetherspoon's, Dell, Sony and Nokia. I use a somewhat aged Nokia 6680 with a program on it called Talks [a screen reader for mobile text], which makes just about everything on it accessible to me. Even the camera is useful. I don't use it much myself, but I ask people to take pictures and then I can at least find named photos when I want to show them to others. My favourite sites are Dabs, Savastore, Expansys and the Official Census sites.

I mostly use the web for checking out and buying gadgets, downloading music and books, booking holidays, paying bills and for researching just about anything – all the things everyone else does, but it's ten times more valuable to me because I usually won't have any alternative way of doing it. I also need to check out for myself the many ways in which my son is keen to spend my money online.

I use Jaws, a screen reader that makes the computer speak in reasonable synthetic speech for the purposes of navigation. I don't use the mouse at all and control the whole thing from the keyboard, using a combination of Windows and Jaws keystrokes. The most useful thing I learned at school was touch-typing.

What annoys me are images with no text associated and registration procedures that end with the security requirement that you type in a string of characters, which are usually a graphic, so not identified by a screen reader.

The access technology alternatives are often purely token – an offer to contact you and complete the process manually, which doesn't in fact happen, or some poor-quality speech. I also find it annoying when, on a holiday site, the facilities in a resort or hotel get shown in a video clip or virtual tour. If I'm lucky, the only alternative I might find is a list of pictures from which I can deduce just the basic list of amenities.

To be fair, web designers still often don't realise there are people like me, using the stuff I have to, trying to get into their sites. If you take the trouble to give feedback, the response is usually at the very least interested, and sometimes there's real subsequent improvement.

Dean is 26 years old and works at Mencap as an accessible communications assistant. He also does stand-up comedy. He has a learning disability.

What annoys me are links saying the same thing, as I don't know which is the best to click on. Too much information can be overwhelming. I would prefer just important information that's easy to understand. When information is unclear it can stop someone from being independent.

Companies do listen but do they listen enough? I'd like them to approach me in a way that shows they're listening to what we say, and that they really do care for our needs.

Diane is a 24-year-old student living in Scotland. She is registered blind.

I have a Nokia phone with Talks on it. It's quite pricey to buy, though, and I only heard about it through word of mouth. I got the program free in a deal with Vodafone, but I think it has stopped doing it. On my PC I use Jaws.

I use the internet all the time, for studying and personal use. I use Google Scholar loads for my course and have both a Hotmail and a university email address. Hotmail can be difficult to use with a screen reader, though. You have to tab around a lot and it's jumpy, with tonnes of junk on it. I also watch a lot of digital TV. I have a digibox with an audio description facility, which is very good, but most programmes don't have audio description. There should be more available, at the cinema as well.

I love shopping for clothes but not, generally, online, because the descriptions can be so vague. If there was more information I'd definitely shop online more. Even if it says 'red skirt' that's no use – how long is the skirt? What kind of red is it? What shape?

I'm quite happy to use Tesco online to shop for food. Milk's milk, you don't need to know much else, although sometimes its cake descriptions can be a bit rubbish. I'm looking for a place to live at the moment and I'm surprised by how inaccessible lots of the housing sites are. For example, people with special needs can't search specifically on them. But this would be useful for more than just disabled people, like couples with young children who don't want stairs.

Companies should see talking to us as two-way communication, and realise that everyone's needs are different – there are lots of different kinds of disability.

*The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 made it a legal requirement for companies to provide fair access to their services for those with disabilities, including websites.

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