Tips for how your agency or firm should do outreach the right way
Unlike a few years ago, today everyone at least pays lip service to reaching out to bloggers, the same way that PR people have always reached out to mainstream media. That’s what my company, Abraham-Harrison, does and lots of other companies try to do it, too. But I am still surprised that many companies don’t do blogger outreach, even today. My conclusion is that what is holding them back is fear. Simply put, blogger outreach is scary.
And it’s not a completely irrational fear. It is true that bloggers are unpredictable and we all know, thanks to posts by the Consumerist and the Bad Pitch Blog, that one false move and you’re public mincemeat. Publicly shamed, drawn, quartered and, finally, drummed out of the corps.
We all know this, except that it isn’t so. The biggest faux pas that most agencies commit when they test the waters with blogger outreach has less to do with the natural meanness of the bloggers and more to do with the behavior of the agencies. In many cases, the bad experiences that many agencies blame on the rudeness of the blogger is square on the agency’s shoulders.
It is a case of the abuser blaming the victim, the blogger.
In truth, the blogger often has no context for a PR outreach, has never been part of the publicity machine, and often doesn’t know what’s expected, what proper and improper behavior is, and most often is just behaving naturally and not part of some insidious cabal aimed at defaming you or your brand or your personal reputation.
Consider your pitch from the blogger’s point of view
What’s happening is that a blogger has been blogging for a while, and eventually assumes that nobody’s really reading or paying attention at all. At that point that blogger drops the affectation that this blog is actually for mainstream consumption, develops a small coterie of passionate readers, they become an ad hoc community (maybe a few blogs are part of this evolving tightly knit emergent family), and then, uninvited, someone who is not part of this close-knit family elbows in and makes a big fuss.
This, often coming across to the bloggers, as “Do you know who I am?” is very rarely taken well, especially after that blogger probably has had to fight insidious attacks from trackback and comment spam only to receive an email that is poorly-targeted, insensitive, lies about the nature of the reason why he is emailing (“I love your blog and have been reading you for a long time,” when obviously that is not true because the blogger knows most people who read his blog), or he even just gets the name wrong, which means that the person who’s doing the outreach isn’t taking the time or attention required to at least give a good college try.
It’s not that the blogger is out to shame and embarrass PR agencies. Most vindictive bloggers are already in the top of the blogosphere and receive tons of bad pitches a week. No, the typical blogger would really love to help. It really took a great heap of combined insult to get your client’s and agency’s shame and ineptitude raised up the flag pole for everyone to salute.
Blogger outreach can be scary, but only if you aren’t thinking about it from the blogger’s point of view. If you stop and consider how to make good use of the blogger’s time, you might get what you are looking for with nothing to fear.
Via Biznology and Socialmedia.biz
Related articles
- Why are you so afraid of engaging bloggers? (socialmedia.biz)
- Blogger outreach is scary (biznology.com)
- Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market (chrisabraham.com)
- Write your blog to be taken completely out of context (chrisabraham.com)
- Bloggers Outreach launches. A new site to connect bloggers to bloggers, and brands to bloggers (garybembridge.com)
- Bloggers Are Promotional Partners, Which Is Bad For PR (socialmediaexplorer.com)
- ConAgra’s Can of Worms & the Blogger Surprise That Shouldn’t Have Been (360i.com)
- Nuffnang launches tool to speed up blogger engagement process (mumbrella.com.au)
- 3 Reasons To Migrate From Blogger To WordPress (genuineseo.net)
- Fire for effect when you can’t get a bead on social media (socialmedia.biz)
Three people have offered to guest blog for me recently , and asked, “What would you like me to write about?” (Uh, nothing. Thanks anyway.)
My 3 tips for guest blog pitches or blogger outreach:
–Read the damn blog before you pitch! This is the Number One mistake.
–It’s best to spend time at a blog commenting over a period of several weeks before you pitch. This will REALLY set you apart from everybody else who is pitching.
–Let me know that you know what I write about, what my audience wants and tell me why you (or your client) is the best person to provide it.
Make my job easy and I will love you.
Three people have offered to guest blog for me recently , and asked, “What would you like me to write about?” (Uh, nothing. Thanks anyway.)
My 3 tips for guest blog pitches or blogger outreach:
–Read the damn blog before you pitch! This is the Number One mistake.
–It’s best to spend time at a blog commenting over a period of several weeks before you pitch. This will REALLY set you apart from everybody else who is pitching.
–Let me know that you know what I write about, what my audience wants and tell me why you (or your client) is the best person to provide it.
Make my job easy and I will love you.
Joan, that is great advice! Yes, the whole “I would love to guest blog for your blog” is a recent scam that’s only aimed at secreting SEO keywords into the post. I guess it’s cool if the guest post is awesome and amazing, but they rarely are unless it’s someone you know and love and want to blog for you.
While your advice is spot-on with regards to a-list blogger outreach, none of that sort of long-term getting to know you dance is really essential — if the pitch is awesome and if the issue is timely and if the message is compelling and if the client is cool — but I do recommend becoming besties with the bloggers that are part of their social scene and their clients’ verticals, but when it comes to the way we pitch, we pitch at thousands of bloggers so following your advice would take us 18-months to do, especially since we don’t focus, at a company, on one business segment.
Your advice is even really great for new bloggers and folks in college or people who have just started into the space, because making friends online is the best bet and best investment you can make.
For someone who really wants to become knows and has a vertical for their publicity or outreach or who works on the social team of one company, making as many deep friends is a necessity.
Thanks so much, Joan, for commenting. Please let me know if you would like a guest post from me — or if you’d like to guest post on this blog. ;)
Joan, that is great advice! Yes, the whole “I would love to guest blog for your blog” is a recent scam that’s only aimed at secreting SEO keywords into the post. I guess it’s cool if the guest post is awesome and amazing, but they rarely are unless it’s someone you know and love and want to blog for you.
While your advice is spot-on with regards to a-list blogger outreach, none of that sort of long-term getting to know you dance is really essential — if the pitch is awesome and if the issue is timely and if the message is compelling and if the client is cool — but I do recommend becoming besties with the bloggers that are part of their social scene and their clients’ verticals, but when it comes to the way we pitch, we pitch at thousands of bloggers so following your advice would take us 18-months to do, especially since we don’t focus, at a company, on one business segment.
Your advice is even really great for new bloggers and folks in college or people who have just started into the space, because making friends online is the best bet and best investment you can make.
For someone who really wants to become knows and has a vertical for their publicity or outreach or who works on the social team of one company, making as many deep friends is a necessity.
Thanks so much, Joan, for commenting. Please let me know if you would like a guest post from me — or if you’d like to guest post on this blog. ;)