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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.