Creating Buzz in Blogs Without Ticking Off Bloggers

Some bloggers get really annoyed with PR people.   They don’t like receiving pitches.

I have a different attitude — I encourage PR people to contact me.  What could be better than to have people bring news and interesting stuff right to my office via my computer?   Sure I might have found the news on my own.  But then again, chances are I might have missed it.  

Consequently, I’ve always been puzzled when I read rants from bloggers who get publicly annoyed with some PR person or another who dared email them. 

Those kinds of rants happen often enough that if you are a PR professional trying to develop buzz for your company or client, it must be difficult to know what to do.  However, public-relations software maker Vocus has some pointers for you. They’ve come out with a very interesting white paper with five tips for how to reach out to bloggers.

This is not your typical stilted-language paper. Instead, it features pointers from four experts — Shel Holtz, principal of Holtz Communication + Technology; Susan Getgood, founder of GetGood Strategic Marketing Inc.; Rachel Weiss, Vice President of eBusiness at Citi Cards; and David Meerman Scott, online thought leadership strategist. It reads almost like a round-table discussion, just in print form – definitely a creative format to consider for your next white paper.

There are a number of good points in the white paper, but these two stand out:

• Blogs can be an indirect step to getting mainstream media coverage. Over 50% of journalists read blogs for story ideas. So if you are having trouble breaking into the mainstream small-business media, blogs may be the indirect ticket to get there.
• Develop long-term relationships with bloggers. That means visit their blogs, read, comment, send them information, etc. I can attest to the value of this. I end up using only a fraction of the material emailed to me. But most of the time I at least skim the emails. Very often it takes multiple emails for me to develop an angle so that I can write about a topic the way I like to write about it. Sometimes that angle comes to me in a flash and in part it’s because the PR person kept it top-of-mind with me.

Go here to download: Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations