Another Blogger Relations Learning Moment

"He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" (John 8:7)

Yesterday, pr management software firm Vocus apparently spammed  bloggers with an announcement of a (insert ironic drum roll here) a white paper and webinar about blogger relations, The Five Golden Rules of Blogger Relations.

I learned about the email blast from a fellow blogger, who emailed me about it because I was one of the bloggers interviewed by Vocus for the paper and mentioned in the email.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased that the firm appeared to have broken just about every guideline I and the other bloggers had suggested. Impersonal pitch, mass email, untargeted, no relationship with the recipient. You name it, all the rules broken. I immediately emailed  the person at Vocus who had interviewed me for the paper. To their credit, she responded immediately that this behavior was not their intention nor their usual practice, she would look into it and get back to me ASAP.

About an hour later, Bill Wagner, Vocus CMO called. Here’s the explanation, in his own words, which he sent at my request following our conversation because I didn’t want to get any of his important points wrong. 

I wanted to follow-up on our discussion about the Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations whitepaper with some additional thoughts…

First, a little background….As you know, many of our customers use our media database to identify journalists and bloggers.  The vast majority of these customers research the journalists and bloggers who cover their space, make a personal connection, share relevant news and track their ongoing conversations.  In short, they build relationships.  On the other hand, we all know some PR people who build large lists and send mass distributions of press releases indiscriminately–something you and others have blogged about extensively.  While I believe these people represent a minority of PR practitioners, their actions give the entire PR community a black eye. 

As a leader in the industry, I believe Vocus should play an important role in educating our customers on best practices for media and blogger relations.  To that end, in writing our whitepaper we sought out advice and opinions from experts such as yourself, Shel Holtz, David Scott and Rachel Weiss, on what to do and not to do when approaching the blogsphere.

Now, with regard to how the Whitepaper was distributed…It was sent to our internal list of marketers and PR professionals as well as directly to our customers, including those from both Vocus and PRWeb.  While most of these recipients are familiar with Vocus and welcome our content, some are not.  For instance, many users of PRWeb (a company Vocus acquired last year) may not recognize the Vocus brand and don’t understand why they’re receiving communications from Vocus.  Understandably, some of them viewed our whitepaper offer as spam. 

Of course, anyone who receives communications from us can opt out, but the lesson is clear:  Whether sending news to journalists, reaching out to bloggers or sharing information with customers, we all have to strive to ensure that our communications are welcome and the information relevant.  I also recognize the need to clarify the relationship between Vocus and PRWeb for the thousands of individuals, marketers and PR professionals that have used the PRWeb service. 

The irony of course is that by trying to educate PR professionals about best practices in media and blogger relations, Vocus is addressing the "spam" issue head-on on behalf of journalists and bloggers alike.  As I mentioned in our conversation, Vocus is the first in the industry to allow journalists and bloggers to "opt-out" from receiving press releases from a particular company.  We’ll also continue to be aggressive in educating our customers in order to help them be more effective in establishing and maintaining relationships with journalists, bloggers and other important constituents.  We hope others will follow our lead. 

Please feel free to give me a call to discuss.  I look forward to working with you to continue to educate both our customers and the industry at large about this and other related issues.

Now some people, the only slack they are going to be willing to give Vocus is that on the end of a rope. I have a slightly different perspective. I absolutely think this could and should have been handled differently and discussed this at some length with Wagner. But, we all have a little dirty laundry in our glass houses. Mistakes are good; I think of them as learning moments 🙂  A mistake is only truly bad when we don’t learn from it.

I doubt that Vocus wanted to be its own poster child for bad blogger relations and do think they’ve learned from this experience. And call me optimistic, but  it really does seem as though the company is making a sincere effort to get it right. Clearly, part of their motivation is to establish a competitive difference from the other vendors, but I’m willing to give them credit for doing some interesting things. Sure, having an opt-out link on press releases doesn’t make up for the poor PR practice of not building contact lists appropriately and carefully, but it is a start. It gives us back some control over our inboxes, and as I understand it, it is not optional. 

So here’s what I hope Vocus has learned from this moment. 

To start with, they should have thought more carefully about the PR Web user base. And I’m not  talking about doing a better job of communicating that Vocus acquired PR Web. That’s basic marketing table stakes, and they know it.

I’m talking about WHO these people are and what sort of communication would be appropriate for them. Think about it. People at PR agencies and in-house PR departments probably have PR Newswire or Business Wire accounts, if only as a matter of habit. Who was PR Web’s initial user base? Bloggers, small  to medium business owners, individuals, non-profits etc. etc. who wanted to issue a press release, often for the Google juice as much as anything else, and didn’t have accounts with the major wires. A communication written for Vocus customers, PR professionals, is not appropriate. No wonder bloggers took exception.

And of course, the irony was so delicious. How could they not blog about it?

Now I abhor mass emails for blogger relations, but I do not object to them for customer marketing communications, if the customer has opted-in and the material is targeted, relevant and preferably short. In this case, I told Bill that perhaps a better path would have been to have different communications, better targeted to the population receiving them.You tell me, PR Web users, but if you had gotten a short 2-3 line email that told you:

•  why you were getting this —  PR Web customer, PR Web now owned by Vocus;
• gave you a short, simple reason to be interested — "as someone who has issued a news release over the Web, we thought you might be interested in this white paper about blogger relations that we’ve produced with the help of Holtz, Scott, Weiss and Getgood"  — and
• gave you the download link without all the marketing-speak,

would you have had a negative reaction? Some certainly still would have, but I am willing to bet that some of you would have been interested, and if not, you would have just hit "delete" and moved on. 

That said, in my opinion, the best approach still would have been to lead by example. Practice what is preached in the paper.  Take the time to read the blogs, get to know the bloggers, mention relevant posts from their blogs, write individualized emails. Perhaps to fewer bloggers, but this is a pretty frequent topic in the PR/marketing blogosphere. There would have been PLENTY of bloggers to reach out to 🙂

I’m guessing that Vocus will do things differently next time. I’m sure plenty of people will be watching. Me included.

And here’s what I’ve learned:

I agreed to be interviewed for the white paper and to participate in the upcoming webinar because I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help Vocus’ customers understand how to do blogger relations right. I still feel that way. However, in future, with any projects like this, with anyone, I will ask to see all promotional materials that mention my name. It may be their white paper, but it is my reputation.

Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, because we care about stuff like that here in the blogosphere, I have not nor do I expect to receive any compensation from Vocus for my participation in the white paper and proposed webinar or this post.

But hey, I’m a consultant. In the future, if they or anyone else wants to retain my counsel on this subject, I’m game.

Tags: Vocus, blogger relations, ethics, pr, public relations, pr spam