Heather, from Business Week, points to a great article in PRWEEK titled, "Managing the new breed of influencers."  Heather pulled out an interesting and helpful quote from the article from Waggener Edstrom SVP Lynann Bradbury:

"Bradbury cautions against a knee-jerk reaction to a negative blog that could offend the writer or a response that comes on too strong, making the person look like a corporate shill. Her advice is to offer information and give the blogger an opportunity to get involved in the issue that concerns him or her. "We say, ‘inform, not influence,’ and ‘involve, not invoke,’" she adds."

In our practice we have a hard time trying to explain that there is a ‘blog culture’, one that is sometimes difficult to understand and navigate if you are not reading blogs.  

"The important thing is to get into this world culturally," advises Jonathan Carson, CEO of BuzzMetrics. "You need to be regularly reading blogs to know the culture. You need to have institutional knowledge to know what tools are available to help you find what you are looking for."

Andrew Gordon explained that, "And that’s where the blogosphere gets tricky. Finding who’s talking about you, and how influential they are, is a science. What to do once you’ve found them, well, that’s the art."