Matt Haughey’s: How to Pitch Bloggers
Hey Everybody,
A friend recently sent me this post by Matt Haughey. It is a great little set of 5 rules for PR people to deal with bloggers. I think that it is pretty good and what a lot of bloggers will agree with. I am a PR guy and a blogger, so I can see some of the disconnect between the two professions. Beyond what Matt says, a PR person can get themselves in a lot of trouble by using the “spray and pray” technique of Cision built media lists. This is because bloggers, unlike traditional media, can lambast your product if they feel you are spamming them. While print media won’t waste ink on complaints and TV won’t burn valuable airtime airing greivances. Bloggers don’t run out of either. So be honest, open and engaging. It is that simple. And no press releases to bloggers! Really! This means you PR people!
So in the spirit of extending an olive branch to the PR industry, here are some very basic tips I haven’t seen anyone mention elsewhere:
1. Don’t ever send a press release to a blogger based on a purchased list
I keep hearing about this thing called the Bacon/Cision listand how all the bloggers complaining about getting spammed are on it (the idea of someone selling a list with my email on it is another matter). As many PR people have stated, connecting PR and bloggers should be a connection made via reading their blog and contacting them with a personal note at the very least. Adding 200 names to a bcc: list on an emailed press release because you got 200 blogger emails from some list is the absolutely wrong way to go about it. Don’t ever do this.2. Go beyond the press release
The rare, few times I’ve felt like enduring all this PR hassle was worth it was when someone from a company contacted me with an invite to preview a product, try out a site, and/or obtain a review item. A press release is the thing I line the bird cage with, a review unit is something I can actually use for a week or two and get a full review story written ready to publish on the day your client launches the product. I can’t stress it enough that a press release sent to me is just plain noise and totally and completely useless. Or if you must, at least just send me a link to one in case I want to learn more about the news you are sharing instead of pasting 2,000 words in ALL CAPS into an email.3. Introduce a feedback loop!
I’ve never been contacted by anyone in PR that bothered to follow-up with me at any point in our “relationship”. I just get a bunch of press releases emailed to me again and again, often by the same people. If you’ve hand-picked out some bloggers covering topics you have clients releasing news about, at least check with the bloggers after a month, or your second message, or some other regular interval. Ask them if the PR they’ve been receiving is helpful and if it should be tweaked, or even ended if it’s not useful.4. Provide an unsubscribe link
This is totally bottom-of-the-barrel, least-you-can-do-to-appease-bloggers stuff here, but at the very least provide an instant, no-humans-required way for a blogger to remove themselves from contact they aren’t getting anything but frustration from. About 1/4 of the PR email I get is managed with some sort of list interface and provides this option, and I use the option when off-topic, all-caps press releases get blasted my way. I prefer a no-humans-required option because I’ve asked people at an agency to remove me and they said they had and sorry for the inconvenience, only to be emailed by the same person two weeks later.5. Use metrics to help you do your PR job
If personally emailing a bunch of bloggers with personal messages sounds like a lot of work that doesn’t scale, try using metrics to help you figure out what works and doesn’t. Right now we have the annual “did my PR firm show up on a blacklist?” metric, but if you implement the suggestions above, keep tabs on what percentage of receivers clicked on a link to read a press release (are your press releases effectively written?), figure out what % click on an unsubscribe link (how effective are you targeting bloggers), figure out how often the bloggers you contact ever write about your clients (how effective your PR/blogger strategy is) and when they do was it because of a press release or did you give them something more (to figure out if newer non-traditional approaches are working better).
Just wanna say thanks to Matt for a good post and thanks to my friend Max Riffner for sending this my way.
William Flavell
“This is because bloggers, unlike traditional media, can lambast your product if they feel you are spamming them”
I can see how a PR person might pick that up but mostly my goals with publishing the list of tips was to point out that it isn’t about appeasing cranky bloggers, it’s that bloggers can often publish perfectly informative blogs without PR, instead relying on RSS, other blogs, Google News, and link aggregators to find news about topics they are interested in.
I published blogs for five years before I got my first unsolicited press release, and if PR people want to stay relevant, they need to acknowledge that bloggers work in an information-rich environment and as a PR person you really need to be adding some value to their approach instead of taking time away with off-topic press releases emailed to them.
Matt Haughey
May 12, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Just want to say that I agree with Matt. I didn’t want to say that bloggers are hard to work with. They can be a lot nicer than traditional media sometimes. Just that it is a different sphere to work in and there can be more to gain and more to lose.
Thanks Matt.
everybodysagenius
May 12, 2008 at 8:57 pm