Recently in Blogging Category

A few weeks ago I met, in person at a social event, a PR professional who sends me press releases for Consuming Louisville. I have occasionally written posts based on information sent to me in this person's press releases but for the most part the releases go to the trash. Why? Well let me quote from the Blog Pitch Policy on Consuming Louisville.

Emails that sound like press releases, press release attachments without actual email messages and other communication that could have just as easily been sent to and from a robot do not hold my attention. Since I'm a real person and you're a real person I'd encourage you to make our interaction person-to-person conversation instead of an email blast to a marketing list. I like people, I don't like email marketing blasts.

Can you guess what kind of contact I get from the PR professional? If I were scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for content maybe I'd be interested in email marketing blasts. If I were one of a staff of many maybe I'd take the time to wade through all of the press releases I get that seem uninteresting at first glance. If I were a print journalist maybe I'd want to be on the email marketing blast list and get the exact same impersonal press releases.

After a couple drinks the PR professional wanted to discuss the frequency, or lack therefore, of posts relating to information he had sent me. He also took issue with my blog pitch policy. He was a little aggressive when he said "why do you have to have things differently than everyone else? All the other publications want it this way." Well see, there's the problem. By "all the other publications" he meant "all the other print publications." I'm not a print journalist. Consuming Louisville is not a newspaper or print magazine. It's a blog. It's a blog I take as seriously as a newspaper writer takes his daily paper but it's still a blog. So stop pitching me like I'm a print journalist. Let's have conversation, let's build a relationship. You, Mr. PR Professional, are one person, sending information to me, one other person. Remember that and plan your communication accordingly. 

My good friend and fellow Social Media Club Louisville board member Jason Falls was recently interviewed and had some interesting thoughts on pitching bloggers versus pitching traditional journalists. He agrees that pr folks shouldn't be pitching bloggers like pitch journals, instead he says they should be pitching print journalists like bloggers:

11. @jaybaer: Do you advocate distinctly different outreach methodologies for bloggers and traditional journalists?

• @jasonfalls: Absolutely NOT. Problem with most PR is they've been reaching out to traditional media wrong. Bloggers are teaching us that.

12. @jaybaer: Very interesting. You're saying treat journalists like bloggers, not the other way around? Relevant, focused pitching, etc.?

• @jasonfalls: Damn straight. Key to blogger outreach is relationships, same as traditional media. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

As always, Jason Falls cuts to the heart of the issue.

You might think, that after meeting me in person, and chatting with me about these issues PR professional would have taken a step or two toward building a working relationship with me. No go. The same old press releases and canned emails are still going to the same trash bin.

I recently instituted a comment policy on Consuming Louisville. It's funny, I always advise clients to have comment policies in place when they establish new blogs but I've been lax in taking my own advice. It's akin to doctors being bad patients I guess.

What's interesting to me though is that I haven't had to institute such a policy. For well over a year the site has been growing and running with very few comment(er) problems. The lesson in that for me is that you can go a really long way toward influencing the content and quality of your comments by setting a tone on your blog. In other words: lead by example.

Comment policies are still important though to explicitly let your audience know what you expect from them and what they can expect from you. 

The Consuming Louisville comment policy is incredibly simple, as I think all such policies should be. It only has two tenets: don't be mean and don't be a spammer. Not every comment policy can be that simple but the more simple and direct you can keep your policy the better (aka more humanspeak less legalese).

The analogy of commenters as guests in homes has already been overused like crazy but it's the most apt one so I'm going to use it too.

Consuming Louisville is my home and I've invited you in. I very much want you to have a good time here and enjoy interesting conversations. To make sure everyone has a good time I have a couple very simple rules for commenting on Consuming Louisville*.

Don't Be Mean
You can disagree with me, you can disagree with other commenters, you can disagree with politicians, you can disagree with anyone you like. You must, however, do that disagreeing in a polite, respectful manner.

I work very hard to make sure Consuming Louisville has a nice tone and feel strongly that the comments should have the same. There are 6 million other places on the internet where you can be mean to people but Consuming Louisville is not one of them. So no name calling, no personal attacks, no hostility, no pointless snark. My personal philosophy is that earnestness and heart wins over sarcasm and snark every single time. This is a philosophy that I've put into play on Consuming Louisville.

Don't Be a Spammer
Dropping a press release into a comment is a no-no. Adding nothing to a conversation other than "hey check out my band/site/product" is also a no-no. If you've got something you'd like to see written about on Consuming Louisville please contact me instead of spamming the comments.

Comments that are either mean or spam will not be published (or they'll be deleted if they accidentally slip through moderation).

*Just like I have rules for guests in my brick and mortar home. While you might think standing on the kitchen table and singing "Freebird" constitutes a good time I'm not going to let you do it in my house. I get to institute such rules because I'm the one paying to keep the lights on and I'm the one left cleaning up the house after you go home. 

Last week I wrote five tips for PR/marketers pitching bloggers. I had two objectives for writing those tips. The first was completely selfish, I'd really like to see a decrease in the number of irrelevant, uninteresting pitches I receive. The second was more altruistic, I want to, in my small way, help ease the relationship (and potential relationship) between bloggers and marketers.

The relationship between bloggers and pr people is so new the boundaries, rules and codes of conduct aren't set yet. Some bloggers want to be pitched, some don't. Some think press releases and pitches are potentially interesting pieces of information they might want to pass onto their readers. Others think pr pitches are nothing more than spam.

I've had my share of bad pitches and even pr spam but as fun as it is just to complain about bad pitches and watch from the sidelines as bloggers and pr folks spar it doesn't really improve anything does it? While I'd very much agree that it is the responsibility of the PR industry not to spam bloggers it would benefit bloggers to be more proactive in helping the PR industry figure out what is and isn't spam, what is and isn't appropriate in terms of pitches, etc. I'm willing to bet if you lay out your ground rules for being pitched most in the PR industry will respect them.

So I encourage bloggers to implement Blog Pitch Policies and very much encourage PR folks to respect them.

Here is my very brief outline and the Consuming Louisville Blog Pitch Policy. Do with it as you will. 

Social Media is a brand new world for many experienced pr and marketing world people. They can't count on all the old rules and procedures that have always been in place. Bloggers aren't newspaper writers, they aren't magazine editors. They are a new, unique entity all their own with different protocols and etiquette. It's rude not to mention inefficient to complain about bad pitches or bad pr people and not try to help them learn to be better when dealing with bloggers.

In the spirit of helpfulness here are five tips for marketers and pr staff to keep in mind when pitching bloggers.

1. Know why you're pitching a specific blogger
Read the blog. I don't mean read the three most recent articles, I mean spend some time in the archives, subscribe to the feed, become familiar with the writer's style and her subject matter. Don't just pitch her because she's a woman and your company or client wants to sell products to women. If you can't figure out a specific reason to pitch this blogger other than she fits into a certain demographic box then don't pitch her. And I'm talking a real reason here. If someone writes about Apple products almost exclusively then she isn't a generic tech blogger and doesn't want to hear about your new software for Vista. If he's a vegetarian food blogger interested in the slow food movement he probably doesn't want to hear about your client's new line of frozen dinners.

Difference number 1: Most Bloggers Want to Hear from You (Barriers to Feedback and Communication)
While I'm sure a blogger would probably never get the name of Social Media Club Louisville wrong, as a Business First story about SMC Louisville's next meeting did, with no serious barriers to comment and communicate the author would have been quickly made aware of such a mistake and fixed it.

I wanted to leave a comment on the story to nudge Business First toward correcting Social Media Club's name in their article. To do that however I  had to register for an account.

Simon Blint is the Director of Visitor Relations for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  He is also a man who until last week had a very small online footprint. Until last week if you Googled Mr. Blint you might have found his Facebook profile and little more. That exercise now will bring you many, many results all discussing his alteracation with a photographer in the museum. Very few, if any, of these discussions put Mr. Blint in a positive light. IN fact most of them make Mr. Blint appear petty, controlling and absolutely not someone you'd want as the director of visitor relations. I say these conversations make Mr. Blint "appear" because neither Mr. Blint or the SF Moma is talking. He might have a perfectly logical explanation for kicking a photographer who was following the letter of the museum's photography policy but since he isn't saying anything we don't know that.

New Media and Politics: Bloggers are Killing the Message is the presentation for our local IABC branch's August luncheon. I haven't seen the presentation yet so I'll refrain from criticizing too harshly. I'll just say that if in fact bloggers are killing "the message" then good riddance and thank you bloggers.

Again, I haven't seen the presentation yet but I'm assuming that by "message" the presenter means a carefully crafted campaign of very limited information that flows only one way. Simply put the marketer tells the audience what he wants us to know and we're supposed to be happy to get it. Our only response to the message should be to either buy the product or vote for the politician the message is telling us to. Bloggers don't play that game. Bloggers dig (and digg) deeper than the press releases or news articles they've been handed. Bloggers say when they disagree with political or business decisions. Bloggers say what they think but more importantly blog readers get to say what they think as well. A blogger posts, commenters respond and many people are participating in a two-way conversation.

The fundamental truth that people complaining about blogs killing the message don't want to hear is this: We don't want the message. We want real information, real conversation, real discussion, real communication with actual humans. Press releases and carefully crafted "messages" from nameless, faceless drones will never inspire the same impact and interest that blog posts and other social media channels provide. The audience knows that. Bloggers aren't killing the message they're giving the audience a choice they've never had before. And when the choice is between your message and information combined with human voices and opinions, well, your message is going to lose every time. No matter what your message is, we've seen it before, and we don't want it again.