Hey Everybody,

I recently read in a press release from Cision that they are offering more blogger contact listings than ever before. The press release was especially focused on Mommy blogs. If you are a mommy blogger out there, what do you think of this? Have you received any unrequested press releases from PR people lately? Do you want to get them?

The Cision press release also highlights the efforts of Cision to push PR people to treat bloggers with more respect and to address them in a very personal matter. Speaking from experience, (as a pr guy and blogger) that is the only way to do things. I need a very personal note or product trial to write about a product or service. I have heard that from a lot of other bloggers too. I have heard bloggers complain that PR people have never even read their stuff and are still sending that press releases. That is crazy and a big risk because it can often result in negative online coverage.

Cision is offering a free download of their tips on working with Mommy Bloggers here.

Best Quote that I read from Cision so far on Mommy Bloggers:

Blogs authored by mothers are one of the more influential social media communities, engaging with a market of more than 30 million women in North America between the ages of 18 and 42 who directly influence household spending estimated at more than $1 trillion a year.

Those bloggers influence so effectively because they are truthful, sometimes brutally so. Just a message of caution to PR practitioners: don’t try to push BS or you just might get some awful coverage. It doesn’t cost anything to put up a blog post.

Anyway, hit me back with what you think?

Thanks

Will Flavell

Hello Everyone,

I have seen a few posts (humorzo, PRSA  Digital Impact, and NevilleHobson) around about this issue. And I thought as a semi-pr guy that I might be able to shed a little light on what this is and what is happening. I don’t work for Cision and I don’t even work in a PR department anymore, I used to do both and I think that I might be able to give an objective light to it.

Vocus and Cision are both list building services that PR people use. The big problem arises when PR people get lazy and build gigantic lists that they then use for Spray and Pray dissemination strategies. I read a lot of blogs slamming PR people for being lazy and spamming. Sadly, that is the case with a lot of traditional-only pr practitioners. Many are used to the old days and large print publication staffs. They are used to press releases being a trade secret that we could sell to clients. They are used to big media coverage being something that you could promise clients. To put it simply, those days are gone and the PR industry is in a world-shift of change from media-fragmentation to user-generated content to trying to pitch bloggers.

Here is a scenario of the problem in action. You take a PR person who has made their career by pitching big reporters and big, mass-audience publications. There is a very standard way of writing and talking in this world. Now you ask them to pitch a very personal, very niche blogger. Obviously, there is gonna be a huge disconnect. So, we have to retrain those people or get new kinds of PR people.

Sorry to be so honest, but it is sadly the truth. And I am a member of the PRSA.

Thanks, sorry for the downer post,

Will Flavell

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!

Here are Matt’s Rules:

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