Susan Getgood

Almost. As the saying goes, almost only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear war. If your blog pitch is *almost* good enough, it’s not good enough. So what does almost look like in blogger relations?

Here are some examples, direct from my inbox.

Here’s what’s wrong, in order of appearance, not importance:

• Sent from a gmail address versus a company, by one person on behalf of the signatory. Who do I contact with questions? How? We are pretty conditioned to reply to an email with our question. Who gets the question?
• "Hey" is not an acceptable form of address, as far as I am concerned, for people you don’t know. If the sender had been reading my blog, she would have known that I wrote about this VERY recently. She’d also know that I am writing this series about good and bad pitches, and perhaps taken a bit more care with this one.
• The worst problem with this pitch is that it doesn’t tell me why *I* should care. I’ve been included in a wide net, a general outreach to marketing and advertising bloggers; the assumption is that we’ll figure out why we are interested in this widget.

Why didn’t this get consigned to the round file? Why do I consider it a near miss versus a total fail? A few reasons. First, it is short, simple and clear about intent. That does get points with me. It doesn’t give me enough information to know whether I am interested, but at least it isn’t full of BS and fluff. More importantly, though, I recognized the name of the agency as one led by a fellow social media consultant who I know personally and respect. Relationship matters. I’m willing to give this pitch a little consideration because I know someone associated with it. [BTW I provided this feedback directly to my aquaintance, and he knows it will be on the blog.]

How would I fix this pitch? First, the simple mechanical things. Send it from a business account and include the reply-to email in the text. "Hi" or "Hello" instead of "Hey." As far as content, it should be more tailored to the recipients. I like to do each email by hand so I can include some personal details, but if you don’t want to go that far, you still can tailor the pitch more closely to segments in your target audience. In this case, I would have done two simple things.

First, cross reference the pitch list against the principals and employees in the agency/company/on the PR team. Find out who are in the same social networks, and reference them in the pitch. Don’t hope that the recipient will make the connection, as I did. Make it for them: Joe Smith in our firm thought you might be interested in this because…This works in any industry where you can reference someone known and respected by the recipient as the source. Just be sure your source is in the loop 🙂

Second, you have to fill in the "because" with something a bit more substantial than "you have a blog in a certain content area." This should be as personal as possible, but you *can* group bloggers with like interests and send them all similar emails. As long as the pitch is relevant. In this case, it would have been relatively easy; though I do not often write about products on this blog, I have mentioned the social media endeavors of the client company in the past. Tell me: "we thought you might be interested because you have written about company x’s social media projects in the past." I’ve masked it, but this is a big company that many social media marketing bloggers have written about.

With the simple additions of the reference name and a connection to what a blogger has actually written, not simply what kind of blog it is, this pitch could be a hit instead of a near miss.

One fiinal comment: the little PS about transparency does seem like overkill, at least as far as this pitch is concerned. There really isn’t a lot of substance to the pitch; no one is offering free product or exclusive access or anything that might be assumed to impact objective opinion. I’m also a little offended by the "please feel free" language. You betcha. If I were going to write about this product for real, I’d have no problem identifying the players. No need to offer dispensation 🙂

Here’s another one that misses because it is a generic pitch aimed at marketing bloggers. It has a bit more fluff than the previous example and makes the error of asking the blogger to write, but the main problem is that it doesn’t connect with the blogger’s interests; it just delivers the pitch.

I emailed the rep back and asked what led her to send the pitch to me. My exact words: Just wondering, what led you to send this pitch to me? Didn’t say whether I was interested or not. Here’s the answer:

That would be my confirmation that I’m on some list of marketing bloggers given to this junior staffer and she has NO IDEA why I might actually be interested. Because, again, there is a better answer. I have covered viral marketing programs pretty extensively in the past and moderated a panel about viral marketing at New Comm Forum 2007. All I was looking for was for this agency to connect what I write about to their pitch. They didn’t.

This program might be a good one, might be incredibly feeble. I have no idea, and no one has given me a good reason for rushing to find out. That’s a near miss, and we ain’t playing horseshoes.

All the PR person had to do was make a connection to the marketing topics I’d covered in the past. In both cases, it wasn’t that hard and there was no need to individualize; more than a few of my peers could have been in the same general buckets, allowing the firms to use mail merge software if they wished.

The common reply to this criticism is that the agencies don’t have the time to make this effort. Instead, they rely on the law of percentages and hope that something will hit. That works sometimes – generally when the product is just so awesome it makes up for the crappy pitch — but it doesn’t work all the time. Or even most of the time.

Make the effort.

Tags: blogger relations

My thanks to all the bloggers who share their good and bad pitches with me. This series of posts would not be possible without  you.

Last time, we talked about how to develop a good pitch and I gave you a few general guidelines. It should come as no surprise that bad pitches ignore nearly all these best practices. For fun, today I’m going to share some recent ones received by me or other bloggers within the last two weeks. None of them are unique — we’ve all received similar ones many times in the past.

And that’s the real shame.

When you have that temptation to do a holiday related pitch? Stifle it. Unless your product really is a great gift for the relevant holiday, your pitch will fall flat. Even if your audience normally loves your product. For example, a company that makes a  BPA-free baby bottle recently sent a Father’s Day themed pitch suggesting that the bottles would be a great gift for the new father. Umm. No. Last we checked, most dads were actually able to drink out of glasses.

Next common flaw. Addressing the blogger by the blog name, not her name. It is NOT that hard to find a blogger’s first name, even if she protects her surname. Better not to use email blast software at all, but if you do, make sure you aren’t sending your pitch to:

or

Because nothing says personal like a database field that hasn’t been filled in properly.

Or sending the same pitch to the same blogger multiple times. In the same day.  I got this press release twice Tuesday. No cover note. Not exactly sure why I got it at all. At least the personnel announcement release — the next pitch below — had a cover note. Still not relevant to my blog though.

 I almost have no words for this one:

Except to say that the only response is to advise the sender that this is information the blogger provides to advertisers only. What level of sponsorship would you like?

There is a special place in blog hell for companies that pitch over and over and over. About the same thing. Even though they get no response. In the real world, we’d call this stalking. For example, this pitch for a self-help book, forwarded to me by more than one blogger:

I think it borders on rude.

Not only do they spam bloggers incessantly with offers for the book, but also they invite us to spam each other. Check out the PS on the email:

As varied as these pitches are, like our good pitches, they too have something in common. They make absolutely no real effort to connect with the blogger. They are looking for hits. And all they do is miss.

Tags: bad pitches, blogger relations

Blank screen. Ready to write that blog pitch. Where should you start?

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that the most important thing is to match your pitch to the blogger. But what does that mean in practice?

It starts with developing a program that delivers something that will interest or intrigue the blogger, be it access, goods or information. No amount of wordsmithing can make a lame offer walk.  The better your offer, the simpler your pitch can be. The best ones? They sell themselves.

To do this successfully, you need to get to know the blogs and the bloggers. What are their passions? Do they write about products? How and in what context?

You also need to be honest with yourself about your product. Are there natural points of mutual engagement intrinsic to the product or do you need to look outward for commonalities? Your goal is to get the blogger to write about you. You’ve got to give her something she wants to write about.

Let’s use laundry soap as an example. It is the rare blogger who will write about laundry soap in the context of how clean it gets the clothes. This doesn’t mean the blogger doesn’t care about clean clothes. It’s just not something she’s going to write about. At least not in a way you’d like. If you are pitching for a laundry soap company, you have to find another point of connection. One with meaning for the blogger. If you can’t find one, save yourself a lot of grief and buy some ads on the blog instead.

Finally, the pitch. Keep it short and simple. Clearly state the offer and relate it to the blogger’s interests. Don’t try to fake it. You won’t get away with it. People can spot the fake <insert a relevant comment from a recent blog post here> sentence structure every time and not just because these mail merge pitches often have typos and mixed fonts and all sorts of other graphical clues. It’s so obvious because the offer is irrelevant to the blogger’s interests or blog style.

A few more hard and fast blog pitching rules:

1. Never send press releases as part of the pitch. It’s okay to include a link but the only time you should email a press release is upon direct request. As in please send me your press release or please add me to your press release distribution list.
2. Never ask a blogger to write. Ever. Don’t ask for link exchanges either — that just shows you are an amateur. 
3. Don’t ask the blogger to let you know if he writes. He may, and that’s great, but it is your job to monitor for mentions, not his to tell you.

What does this look like in practice? Here are this week’s good pitches.

First, a pitch for Build-A-Bear Workshop. Sent to Julie Marsh, mothergoosemouse, by Celeste Lindell from BARKLEY, Kansas City.

This pitch works because:

• Celeste is a blogger herself, and has met Julie in the past. As Julie noted when she forwarded the pitch: "reaching out to bloggers through bloggers – always a good bet."
• The simple pitch is appropriate for Julie’s family. The toy is something one of her girls might actually want. I’m more worried that they’ll both want one 🙂
• Doesn’t ask Julie to write, but makes a simple request for the picture to the Flickr group, if the blogger is so inclined. In the end, the overall impact of the Flickr group could be more powerful than any number of blog posts about the stuffed animal.

Nicely done.

The other good pitch is one from Jason Falls’ outreach for Jim Beam’s Stuff Inside campaign. Jason sent me a few of his pitches — including one custom done for me, as I mentioned in my previous post.

The basic premise of the campaign is that Beam is using its marketing budget to highlight people who "embody the spirit of the "Stuff Inside", — those who act with character, do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, help others who are less fortunate or persevere through a struggle." You can read more about it on their pages, and I’m sure you will be hearing more about it in the near future when the advertising campaign launches. The campaign clearly and cleverly ties into the company’s overall branding, but doesn’t seem too cloying. To me, but more importantly, as we’ll discuss below, also to a longtime industry watcher. And in the end, that’s what important. Not what I think about it, but what the customer does.

Jason’s pitch also claims that this is the first social media campaign by a spirits brand. I’ll buy that, and am not at all surprised that a spirits company understands the benefits of approaching people through their interests rather than the product features. After all, that’s how all alcohol advertising is done. They can’t sell too hard on the product features ("Gets you hammered faster than other tequilas") so liquor advertising is always about lifestyle, feelings, how your drink of choice affects how others perceive you. And so on.

Let’s talk about the pitch. Jason did custom pitches for each blogger. We’re going to look at one he sent to Chuck Cowdery, a well-known journalist and blogger in the spirits industry.  Here’s the pitch:

And here’s the homerun: Cowdery has already written about the campaign, Jim Beam Launches Social Media Campaign. Among other things he says:

And that, my friends, is the true measure of success. Not whether  I — or you — like a program. Whether the people for whom it is intended like it. In this case, it sounds like Beam is on the right track. Jason emailed me that he hasn’t had any other hits as good as Cowdery yet but he is working on a few things with various bloggers. I hope he’ll update us here with a comment when something interesting happens!

These two pitches, for very different products and with very different styles, have one important thing in common: they successfully connect with the blogger. That’s what you should strive for when you sit down to write that perfect pitch.

Don’t worry about the hit. Just think about connecting.

Batter up.

Tags: Build-A-Bear, Jim Beam, blogger relations