This is a note to bloggers and also a followup/response to Vanessa’s and Claudia’s honest and very helpful blog posts to PR folk. Being a PR guy before, I’d like to propose that the reversed approach could work for bloggers too and possibly reduce the amount of miscommunication and frustration felt on both sides.
If you’ve never received an invite from a PR agency or corporation like Vanessa and Claudia and you want to get in some of the journalistic action, here are a few tips on how you can go about making yourselves known to PR agencies in a productive way.
- If you’re seriously into something you know corporates use PR agencies for, write to them! For example, if you love your Nokia mobile phone, why not write in to ask to be invited to the product launch of the next product? I would suggest that you could even propose fun things to do such as borrow the product for a review, tell them you want to do a video review and upload it to YouTube, etc. A good starting point for bloggers in the region is the Asia Pacific PR Directory.
- PR agencies need to justify to their clients why they’re spending time and money on you. So when you write to them, tell them not just your interests, but also alert them to your Technorati ranking, and reveal a bit about your visitor statistics to prove you’re worth their while.
- PR guys need to be smart about who they target and brief their client on who’s coming. So make it easy for them by always having an about/profile page and readily available contact details such as an email address and mobile number. Photos of yourself would be useful too if they’ve never met you before.
- If you have a bunch of friends who happen to care about something niche, like a bunch of technology geeks who want to check out Microsoft’s PhotoSynth, why not write in as a group and propose to the agency to persuade their client to get a really good engineer down to demo it for you while you livecast it.
If this reversed approach makes you shy, let me tell you that many professional journalists do the same when they want to write a stroy on a specific topic/technology. PR agencies are gateways to top corporations and have ready spokespeople to speak to you on the topic that inerests you most. All they ask for in exchange is influence through an honest medium. So if you’re already going to write about something you love so much, you can make use of the agencies to get so much more.
On the flip side, if you hate a product you got, you can feedback to the PR but customer support will most likely be your best bet in solving your crisis.
Filed under: Social Media
Engagement should be a two-way thing. As an in-house PR guy, I’d love to have bloggers come up to tell me who they are and why they love my products.
But like Ben points out – we do like honesty.
Great post!
I don’t really agree with your post, Ben. If the company/agency can’t be bothered to reach out/do their proper homework, why would a blogger come forward when it’s just so much easier to enter an “indifference” mode or get contacted by another company?
It’s like traditional journalist pitching. If you don’t make the calls/send the emails/do your spiels, do you expect the journalist to beat a path to the door asking for the story? It’s just easier for them to run some other story of your competitor, or not run it in the papers at all.
I think the responsibility will ALWAYS be on the company/agency, and giving the option of “our enthusiasts will come to us” is a lazy method that benefits no one.
I feel that there’s 2 ways to look at this.
Firstly, journalists pitching is essential as the companies need/want the mass media market to cover their product. But as the blogging scene in Singapore is still in the developing stage, and its not yet main stream (except for MB, XX and a couple others). The companies might not see us bloggers as a source for their pitching YET.
And as a blogger, I feel that it also pays to be honest and upfront about it. If they don’t come to you, but you feel that your blog should be one that covers their product, why not just drop them a friendly email and tell them about you and your blog. I’ve come across several folks who are still not really following the online happenings yet but would like to start somewhere. But they don’t know how and who to start pitching to. So by taking the first step, it may be a start of a good future partnership.
Untill one day more bloggers turn mainstream in Singapore, than we can sit back and wait for ppl to come knocking on our doors.
I agree with Ben. Daryl’s argument regarding companies pitching to the media is flawed. Communication between PR agencies and the media is a two-way street. If a journalist is passive and slow in getting the scoops and the exclusive stories from the news makers, he will stand to miss out on good stories. Same for the relatively unknown bloggers. If they have a good product, why not proactively reach out to the PR folks? It’s a win-win situation for both.
I can see the points made for both sides. For Ben’s suggestion to work, bloggers here need to know that they can approach such companies in the first place. Currently the norm is for companies or their PR agencies to approach us, not the other way round. How will we know which companies here are receptive to bloggers?
Perhaps the companies who welcome bloggers should add a section on their website titled, “For bloggers”, containing media that we can use on our own blogs, and details on who we can contact if we want to try out their products, take our own photos and videos, etc.
On the other hand, how many brands are popular enough for bloggers to come knocking on their doors? I might bang on Apple’s – they don’t even need to woo bloggers – but I might not pay attention to other companies’ product launches unless I was approached by them first. And then, if they are able to show me something interesting about their products, I may blog about them. My opinion of such companies tends to improve because I feel they’re making an effort to reach out to me.
Also, whether to woo or wait to be wooed depends on the company’s objectives and current positioning. If the company’s customers are mainly from one type of profile (e.g. middle-aged) but they want to attract new customers from another group (e.g. youth), they can’t expect the youth to approach them just like that, because their brand hasn’t been strongly associated with that group before. So they still need to actively woo bloggers from that profile. Once the brand becomes popular with that new demographic, they can sit back and be approached instead.
@Wei Chong: If the journalist was writing genuine stories (as in interest pieces) and misses out on the great scoops, I agree with what you’re saying.
But, if the company is trying to get the word out on a major product launch or opening a new office in a new country or something, I don’t think the comms team would sit back and say “We’re Well-known Brand X, the journalists will come to us”.
Van brings up a good point about how many brands are popular enough and who to contact. I think many bloggers fairly like some brands over others. Expecting them to be rabid enough to actually a) find out who they can contact b) contact the person c) do all this of their own initiative, doesn’t sound like a very likely scenario.
It doesn’t matter whether the person is new or old at his “job” be it in mainstream media or a blogger. I bet when companies in the tech or men’s fashion want to get the word out, they’ll call PC Authority or GQ until someone leaves the phone off the hook.
I just don’t see why it should be any different for bloggers who give up prime real estate on their sites and provide an authentic, credible opinion, for almost literally nothing back in return. Unless somewhere the insinuation is that bloggers < journalists and thus should jump through their own hoops….
Wow. Nice discussion going on here Ben. I like!
The first thing we need to understand is that most companies have limited PR resources. In many large organisations, the PR team is often a solo operator (compared to truckloads of salespersons). With the lack of bandwidth, plus the fact that people working in PR have to also have some worklife balance (though usually less than others…), there is a need to focus on the 20% that will give you 80% of the results.
This means that PR folks both internal or hired have to be measured in their social media relations efforts vis-a-vis cultivating mainstream media journalists. Which also means that they will only focus on the few bloggers who are perceived to matter, and leave out the rest.
Agree with the points raised about how valuable a company’s products and services are deemed to be. Apple hardly does anything to cultivate bloggers, yet people are blogging about their products like crazy. On the other hand, Microsoft has entire armadas of blogging Microsofties, yet their product launches have never seen the same level as online excitement as an iPhone or MacBook Air.
There is another point which is related to this. Bloggers shouldn’t only pitch to companies – they should also pitch themselves to the mainstream media. Both mrbrown and Xiaxue gained tremendous traction during the early days when they got repeated coverage in the mainstream press. This has helped them to gain cult status amongst the typical Singaporean. However, few other bloggers have that kind of name recognition in Singapore.
Thanks for the comments and discussion guys. Maybe just to be a little clearer, I wrote this for bloggers specifically. the PR folk have already been hard at work extending their pitching from journalists to bloggers (as demonstrated by VanTan and Claudia). This is not a call to be lazy, but an invitation to collaborate as Daniel and Wei Chong have mentioned.
Compared to the finite (and falling) number of magazines and newspapers, how is a PR agency going to identify the best bloggers from the half a million blogs in Singapore alone? Even if I gave you five interns doing nothing but identifying bloggers for a month they’ll still find it tough.
Marketing is never just one way. Yes, the first time I saw the iPhone it was one way from a PR effort to the media. What happened after that? I responded. I looks it up on the blogs, I checked out its specs, I talked to people about it, I followed the jailbreaking dev, and I bought it. For every marketing effort there is a response, and responding to PR if you have an influential platform is one of the options.
@Walter: Good point on the pitching to MSM. Some bloggers can rise to celebrity status and then be of interest to a wider audience. This reminded me of Perez Hilton who ended up getting so much more exposure when he started appearing on MTV shows.