Bloggers: Be Proactive in Educating PR Pros (UPDATED)
Not even the most rascally of bloggers or journalists expect or even want the PR industry to die; really they just want better PR. But while they writhe in pain at the volume of misdirected pitches, few bloggers take action beyond whining. If anything, the PR and marketing pros themselves seem to be the only ones engaged in the slow-drip of Blogger Relations education.
If you are a successful blogger, part of the reward for your hard work is that you’re gonna get pitched.
(That’s not a bad thing. Not all pitches are bad. A good pitch could help a blogger write their best-post-ever. A good pitch could result in some cool toys to play with; a free trip; an interesting meeting; a job offer.)
But you have some control over this. Why not take the time to inform marketers about HOW you’d like to be approached?
An attempt was made back in 2005 to standardize this mechanism. I think it’s worth re-visiting. I asked our in-house graphics whiz to bang-out “boring” and “fun” versions of the original badges.
If you’re a blogger who wants NO PITCHES, the badge alone should suffice…
If you’re a friendly type who wants to hear what everyone has to say, similarly the “PR OK!” icon says it all (though you might want to link the icon to your contact info)…
But if you are like MOST bloggers, you don’t mind a GOOD PITCH and tend to despise & discard crappy pitches. This is where you need to Act Responsibly. Educate! Tell the PR pro “what makes a good pitch.”
Link the “PR?” badge below to a separate section of your site in which you describe your personal preferences and gripes…
Sometime this week, I’m going to add the funny li’l “PR?” avatar to my sidebar nav. It will link to a new page on PR-Squared on which I’ll inform would-be PR pitchmen that they are welcome to send me a note, but that I’ll be looking for:
“A brief pitch that demonstrates an understanding of my blog’s typical topics.”
I was planning to gin up a list of 5–or-so benchmarks but, on reflection, this is all I’m looking for from anyone. I don’t necessarily care that the PR pro is a regular PR-Squared reader or participant (though that’d be nice). I just don’t want them to waste my time with stuff I would never write about. (That’s all any blogger wants, at a high level.)
But it never hurts to be completely unambiguous. If bloggers make the effort to be clear about their expectations, they have more justification to be enraged at bad pitches. The blogger can take some responsibility for their in-box; if they don’t do something to educate would-be pitchmen, they’ll continue to be abused.
These badges might help cut down on the bad stuff. Know a cranky blogger? Maybe you could share this idea with them?
UPDATE: Embed code now available. And my new, official “PR PITCH POLICY,” which will be linked from here on out to the cutesy avatar in the right-side nav.
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it’s funny – the more I do blogger outreach the more I feel that it’s just not about us. and the more I hear calls of “you have to tell us how to pitch you” I think we’re only annoying most bloggers even more.
the badge is a smart idea – if your focus is on the PR person. why should a blogger have to do anything? the overwhelming majority are NOT journalists, and there will never be a process to do this. The purpose and mission of a blogger has never been, and will never be, to receive pitches from people like me. so why should they go out of their way at all?
The answer has always been, and will always be, developing relationships with online opinion leaders WITHOUT having to pitch them. Sometimes that’s not possible, but most of the time it is. It’s about being truly social in our networking.
I spend time reading and listening to what bloggers in the communities I care about are saying, and then I contribute my thoughts. I make it my business to know the subject matter. I ask members of my team to know different communities as well. When I conduct outreach, I try to build a program that bloggers find compelling and valuable. I’ll put my results and reputation next to anyone in the business.
Furthermore, when a client comes to me and says “I want placements in blogs,” I tell them it’s the wrong metric. You want placement on a blog? buy an ad. The metric that matters is building a relationship with someone who expresses her or his thoughts online. And the only way to do that is to be genuinely concerned with what they’re talking about, and you can’t do that in the context of “hey, I have this client who wants something from you” and you have nothing of value to contribute.
To be candid, I think we all know this and many of the commenters above are thinking this scenario isn’t possible and they’re trying to do the best they can in the context of what’s presented to them. I just refuse to accept that – I turn down some work and I sometimes anger colleagues. But I know I’m doing this the right way and I’m building sustainable relationships that I’ll have for years to come, building value for clients and my company.
Proactive. That is what we all need to be. Thanks for using your resources once again to be just that.
This is a great post and funny, super idea
Sharing now
Nice idea, blogged.
John.
Excellent idea Todd. Love it.
Coming from the PR side, thank you Todd. This would make things much more clear for a lot of folks who want to treat bloggers like print editors. Respect the wishes of the bloggers. They are really cool and deserve the good stuff.
Great stuff Todd.
Here’s the thing about traditional media… we know what they write about (cover, talk about, etc) because they make no bones about telling us up front. Publication or program statements delineate what is discussed, what topics are covered, what aspects are of interest. Journalists have beats that can be very focused and/or specialized and it isn’t very hard to figure out who deals with what. (Though that being said, we still see too much poorly executed pr that doesn’t understand the link between what’s being pitched and who it’s being pitched to!)
With bloggers, we rarely have that kind of pre-determination of focus. It’s more of a game of ‘hunt and peck’. How much easier would it be if bloggers made a definitive statement about what they are interested in writing about–or to keep on topic with your post, what they are interested in receiving information about. This seems onerous, I realize, but it would go a long way to improving relations in both directions.
When you consider just how varied the topics that a blogger may comment on, it just makes that much more sense to have something in the same vein of ‘pitch’/'no pitch’ buttons… “Info I’m interested in”.
That way a blogger can still talk about all the various things s/he wants to talk about – personal, general interest and professional – but should only be getting info that they want to use. And if they don’t get the right info, then they’ve got every right to be ticked off!
Great idea.
We’re getting ready to launch our new service and deciding which blogs to target can be quite a task and the last thing we want to be accused of is sending off faceless impersonal “spam” to bloggers.
This insanely simple idea, let’s us know at a glance… This should be supported widely – I think the badges need a little work though – lol.
I don’t think the buttons would be a good idea because a blogger that obviously welcomed PR pitches would probably have less credibility than a blogger that was viewed as digging up their own informational sources. PR people, including me, will almost always have a slant on the information that is presented.
To address the worst offenders you’re going to need to get this info into Vocus and Cision.
The problem is that a lot of mis-pitches are the result of building a list and mass mailing to everyone without any clue about who they are or what they /really/ write.