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Blog Bling
May
23
Creating Buzz in Blogs Without Ticking Off Bloggers
May 23, 2007 | Anita Campbell
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
Comments
2 Comments so far
Thank you Anita! Great info on “Blogs”. Great site!!!
I’m like you, doesn’t bother me to receive an email like that. If your going to bring the information to my doorstep, I won’t complain. Consequently, I’ve met and networked with a lot of great people as a result.