An article by Eric Karjaluto on his blog IdeasOnIdeas resounded very well with us in the office. In his post he provides some suggestions on how PR people can share information with bloggers without pissing them off. He says right now PR people seem to see email in the same way people used to use fax – blast it to as many writers as possible in the hope that someone might pick it up and write about it.
Every week I receive a handful of emails from PR firms, wanting me to write about something they’re helping promote. I rarely do so for them, but it’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s just that their tactics suck. They sell their clients on the notion of “blogger relations” but in fact, they’re treating email like a fax machine. They send the same generic message out to a ton of bloggers, piss everyone off in the process, and then bill their client for doing so. (Nice.)
I’ve connected with a lot of bloggers over the past few years and as such, I’m continually baffled by how tough a time PR firms have doing the same. As you know, I’ve called a few of them out for their bad practices in the past, but today, I thought I’d share some tips on how you can build links with people who blog.
His tips include ‘Remember that bloggers are people’; ‘Ask for permission’, ‘Double, triple, quadruple check’; and ‘Thank people’. As you can see from the image above, we think this advice is very timely.
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Hi Piers,
Its lazy, like any industry PR has good and bad practitioners and there’s no excuse for it. Being both a PR and a blogger, I get the spam and use the rules function in mail.app to bar mail from the offending domain.
Its not ideal, but like drunk drivers they would often look at posts like this confident in the knowledge that it wasn’t them (until they see their name and telephone number pictured), or more usually when their friends and peers point out that they have been mentioned on a blog.
Perversely the very technology that makes the web easier to discover great content also makes it easier to build spam lists: this isn’t a technology issue or an industry issue, but a HR issue.
Best regards,
January 7th, 2009 at 6:29 pm