Recently in Policies Category

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.