Yesterday, I was speaking to a friend who works in the public sector and they asked me if I would explain the blogger outreach process and how to target bloggers properly without getting burnt.
We have been busy at work over the last few weeks, reading, commenting and engaging with bloggers from lots of different sectors, so I felt pretty well drilled to give her my thoughts.
As I started to explain the difference between media relations and blogger relations, I began to realise that there was one major difference that I needed to highlight.
The truth is a good blogger relations campaign cannot be rushed. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am definitely not saying that media relations can be either but I know some PR companies out there have been known to blanket email news releases. If I am honest, I will hang my head in shame and admit I may have done it before too.
James Warren wrote a great post on this issue a while ago. He posted about how people should ‘Be Nice’ in the social media space. I completely agree with James on this but I think I could add two further words to this for those who are considering blogger relations and those are ‘don’t rush’.
If someone does rush blogger relations they could well find themselves being named and shamed in a variety of places such as the badpitchblog.
If you really want to communicate with bloggers my advice would be read, read, do a bit more reading and then double check what you have done before you even begin to start engaging. Believe me, if you do that and take the time out it makes it all the more rewarding when you get a positive response from a blogger like: “thanks for actually taking the time out to read my posts”.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
