Blogger? That's a specialist lumberjack, right?

Four in-the-know mobile industry PR executives, each from different companies, were talking to me the other day.

We got on to the subject of mobile operators and their functional inability (with the exception of 3UK) to deal with bloggers. I naratted by experience with Vodafone that I documented on the site a while ago (I emailed their PR department asking if they could tell me what handset Arun Sarin used — they declined. Commercially sensitive information it seems). One of the PRs was telling me that an unnamed executive related to el Chumpo (o2) thought that a ‘blogger’ was a specialist lumberjack.

Now, I can’t quite believe that. Well, I do believe it. Yet. Seriously, surely, you’re in public relations, the market’s changed, yes, so you have caught up on the blog phenomenon, right? You got that memo, yes? I do wonder sometimes, I really do.

So I reckon it’ll be worthwhile doing a wee test for posterity.

My idea is this: I’ll email the same question to each PR for every major UK mobile network in the United Kingdom and in the United States and then publish the answers here.

I need your help though. Do you have a suggestion for the question? I don’t want to email asking for price plan recommendations or handset availability. I’m thinking maybe asking the ‘what handset does your CEO use?’ question again. (Incidentally, the PR from Verizon — if memory serves — responded to that question last year citing commercial issues with publicising that information!)

What do you reckon? I’ll send the question next week and see how we get on. My prediction? We’ll get a decent answer from 3UK. I reckon Vodafone will decline, I think T-Mobile might be up for it. As for el Chumpo and Orange, I don’t know. What about Virgin Mobile? Do thy count as a ‘major mobile operator’? I think so. You’d think Virgin would be up for answering that, don’t you? It’ll be an interesting experiment anyway.