Joining the conversation: What PR needs to learn about BR (blogger relations)

Judging from the tenor and frequency of discussions popping up around the marcomm blogs last week, it seems that some public relations folks need to learn that blogger relations (BR) is a different type of beast, and should be handled appropriately.

Exhibit A: Diva Marketing‘s Toby Bloomberg discusses a recent PR agency pitch to her that fell flat (Agencies Miss the “Relations” in Blogger Relations Strategies). Seems the agency rep didn’t take the time to learn much about Bloomberg or her blog, and rather than engaging Bloomberg in some authentic conversation, the flack spammed her with a generic pitch.

“Bloggers,” Bloomberg writes, “are not The Press. They are not Journalists. They are just .. well, people. But the pr and advertising and brand professionals seemed not to notice. They send silly press releases or emails that pretend to ‘know’ the bloggers. They send messages that are often too jolly, often too crafted and often too slick. They play by the rules of old media relations not of new social media communication” (emphasis added).

Bloomberg lists a dozen tips for PR people trying to connect with bloggers. Some are pretty basic: “Read my blog” and “read the About page” — typical “know your audience” stuff. It’s all good advice.

Jeanne Sessum piggybacks on the discussion, offering her own take, which includes some tough medicine for the flacks. She requires flack-bloggers to be in the Technorati top 5,000 (I’m not sure this one’s not even in that league, currently ranked at 325,080), to argue with Robert Scoble (whom I rarely read anymore), and to know all sorts of other insider baseball, such as naming the father of podcasting, the mother of blogging and the second cousin of Al Gore, who invented the Internet. Sounds a bit too exclusionary for my tastes. But Sessum’s a blogging vet who has dealt with more than her fair share of bad pitches, so I can forgive her her strident stance against bad pitches. “I’m getting several of these pitches a day, where I used to only get a couple a week,” she writes. “They are getting stupider, even though the tools that slice and dice bloggers into media outlets should be getting smarter. The problem is that we were never targets; we were never outlets; we never said we were media; we still aren’t. Old PR models still don’t work here” (emphasis added).

Note to self: Don’t pitch Jeanne Sessum.

Exhibit B: The Bad Pitch Blog picked up on the same gaffe and advises that PR folks spend more time writing good pitches. “P&G spends millions to ensure a customer’s first moment of truth with a product will be a good one. Consider that an editor’s first moment of truth with your client and its product(s)/service(s) may be your pitch” (emphasis in the original post). Bad Pitch emphasizes the importance of knowing the audience with a later post about one of the worst story ideas ever.

Way back in 2004, the folks at re:invention put together a checklist for PR folks who are thinking about sending ideas to them. It’s a good list.

Exhibit C: Flacks, don’t assume we know you. This is not about the aforementioned pitch, but another. Copyblogger got the same email — ver batim — and then carped about it, too.

Exhibit D: In the interest of fairness, here’s a response to the public callouts from someone who knows the PR agency person who made the errant pitch.

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It’s unfortunate that so many PR people seem to be clueless about blogger relations. One of the reasons we encourage our PR staff to blog (here and here) is so they don’t commit the same gaffes as the aforementioned.

The UMR PR staff has dipped its collective toes into the blogosphere waters a couple of times. One was a news release about a student-entrepreneur’s mobile social-networking startup, ImThere.com; the other about another student’s personalized online library system, called GuruLib. We had decent success with getting bloggers interested, because we took the time to target our pitches (mobile, tech and music blogs for ImThere, and tech and library blogs for GuruLib), we took the time to read the blogs we pitched to, and we took the time to actually write personal notes to the bloggers. As a result, ImThere got mentions on Wired’s Listening Post (a venture capitalist reading the post contacted the student for more info), Smart Mobs and Mashable, while GuruLib got a nice review in Confessions of a Science Librarian, a blog we link to from UMR’s research blog, Visions. I’m not saying we have perfected the “BR pitch,” but we are trying to move beyond the stereotype of the PR flack who pitches a generic story scattershot, in hopes of hitting something — anything — to show a bit of return for our hard work. To reiterate Toby Bloomberg’s thought, we realize that bloggers — like journalists, really are people, and people want a good story to share.

For PR folks, effective BR — blogger relations — requires a shift in the way we operate. If we’re going to do it right, we’re going to need to invest more time building and sustaining relationships — just as we do with our key reporters, editors and news directors.