Marketing Roadmaps

Blogger relations

From the category Clueless: Pitches that make you go Hunh?

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Some blog pitches are so bad you wonder, really wonder, about the person who pressed <send> Others are just a bit off. A rare few are excellent – you can’t wait to write or participate in the program. Later in this series, I’ll talk a bit about the secret sauce that makes some pitches really stand out.

Today though, I am going to share a few that just make you go Hunh?

First, this pitch from a PR agency that appears to have forgotten… the pitch.

Clearly, it is meant to be a soft-sell teaser to get the mom blogger to opt-in to learning more cleaning tips. But, leaving out the information about WHO the pitch is for doesn’t make a blogger want to know more. It just makes her laugh. Typos and the poor salutation don’t improve the situation.The email also wasn’t signed; after the "Thanks" there was some space and the email footer.

Finally, as we’ve discussed here many times, most mom bloggers don’t write about cleaning tips. Here’s my favorite cleaning tip: set aside the money to hire a cleaning service or marry someone obsessed with cleanliness and willing to do the work. Camouflauging your cleaning product pitch as a fun activity for kids won’t change that. Grade: Fail.

Next, we have a pitch for a "Life changing contest on Facebook." Yawn.

When I dragged this out of my spam folder Thursday morning, my first reaction to this teaser campaign was that it was mostly boring, bad grammar and lame blogger exclusive notwithstanding. I did however note that it was from a firm that has something of a reputation in blogger circles for — let’s be polite and call it "excessive emailing." I wondered what the follow-up might be.

I didn’t have to wait long.

Notice the similar language to a pitch included in a previous bad pitch post. I won’t leave you in suspense; yes, it is the same agency, and no, I won’t name it. Here’s the thing  — one day doesn’t even give the blogger a chance to read her email, let alone decide whether she has any questions. This isn’t following up; it is stalking.

The follow-up email also wasn’t from the same person who sent the initial email. Of course, both emails were sent by a bulk email program that must have had a glitch and attached the wrong sender name to the follow-up. Grade: Fail.

Lessons  learned:

  • Teasers and exclusives. They have to be good, really good. Connected tightly to something the blogger cares about and will write about. Otherwise, you’re just looking for free advertising. Which you won’t get.
  • Follow-up. No sooner than a couple days after you send the pitch. And make it a follow-up: short and sweet. Don’t resend the whole pitch as they did in the example above. If the blogger didn’t get it for some reason, and it sounds intriguing, he’ll ask for more info.
  • If you use mail-merge, make sure your technology works properly.
  • Exclamation points do not make otherwise uninteresting copy interesting. Use them sparingly if at all.
  • Don’t try to fool the blogger; she knows there’s a client and a product. Stealth pitches just set off alarm bells about your agency.

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Fixing blog pitches that *just* miss

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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.

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Pot Pourri of Pungent Pitches

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Yes, friends, it is that time again. The weekly  Bad Pitch post on Marketing Roadmaps. And we have some doozies for you today in honor of my  appearances on the live BlogTalk Radio shows, For Immediate Release at 1 pm Eastern and Motherhood Uncensored at 9 pm Eastern.

A note about our first example, which was sent to a shopping blog written by a parent blogger. Normally I black out all identifying details in a bad pitch — company, product, blogger who shared it, PR flack who sent it. For you to experience the full impact of this pitch, however, I have to include the product name. That said, keep in mind that my focus is on whether the pitch is good or bad, not whether the product is. You have to make up your own mind about that.

Leaving aside all the puns and bad bathroom jokes I could make, all of which are tempting, but not relevant to the topic at hand, what’s wrong with the pitch? It’s completely off-topic for a shopping blog aimed at parents. It’s more suited for Carrie Bradshaw and her Sex And The City pals. This is then compounded by the commission of the most common errors we see in blog pitching — bad salutation, over-use of emphatic punctuation and adjectives and sales pitch language. Could this product successfully be pitched to a blogger? Maybe, but I’m guessing that the only people who will actually write about it will do so for the humor value.

I’m no exception.

Next example.The link request. I’ve mentioned before that you should never ask for links or link exchanges. Here’s one for the record books in terms of presumption and borderline rudeness.

It was a bulk blast, there is absolutely no information or reason given for why this blogger might want to link to the site, and the blogger who forwarded  it to me said she was particularly turned off by the presumption of compliance — "thanks for your cooperation." Bottom line, if you want a link, buy an ad. If you want a relationship, tell a story, offer some value, become a resource for the blogger. She’ll decide if and when she writes about you.

Some of the other fun stuff in people’s inboxes this week included:

This highly personalized pitch for a something called a "Task Economy,"  with attachment. Don’t ask me what it is. I didn’t read the attachment. Check out the cool reference numbers. So much better than signing your email.

Here’s the third email received by a mom blogger for an event in the San Francisco Bay Area for which she did not RSVP. Given that she lives in another state.  This is a common problem with event promotions; firms often do not take the time to find out if the bloggers live in the area. Personally, I don’t think it is that hard to find this information, but I’ll give a pass on the initial invite. But not on the third reminder if the blogger does not respond. That’s called stalking. Oh, and fix your database. The only person you should be addressing as Mother is your own.

What’s worse than being invited to attend an event in another town or city? Being pitched on an event that has already occured to which you were not invited. The mom blogger who forwarded me this next pitch noted: "Here’s another that just makes me shake my head. Actually, I think most of my bad pitches come from this same person. Always some PR release about something I have no interest in.  :)"

What was wrong here? As noted, it’s a pitch to write about a past event.  Bloggers rarely want to write about an event in the past that they did not attend, even if the event is something that interests them. In this case, it was also completely off-topic for the mom blogger. Other problems: six  jpg attachments and sloppy work. Note the duplicate mention of the beauty blogger who participated in the event.  The event itself sounds interesting. It’s a shame that the outreach wasn’t better.

That’s it for this week’s supply of pungent pitches. Friday, we’ll have an analysis of a near-miss, a pitch that could have been much better with just a little more thought.

The proper role of the news release

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My recent post about the direction this blog was heading led some folks to think that I didn’t see any value in press releases. Nothing could be further from the truth. The press release, or more properly, the news release, has a very important communications job, whether it’s the old form or the fancy social media form with links and video. Quite simply, it conveys news to the media in an understood format. Or at least that’s what it should be doing.

The news release is not and never has been the optimum form for communicating that same company news to our customers. There have always been much better alternatives – face to face, telephone, direct mail, annual reports, email, newsletters and now blogs — for speaking directly with our customers.

The rise of the search engines in the 90s, however, led to a bizarre and mistaken transformation of the news release, in its natural and somewhat inaccessible form, into sales collateral. The story went something like this:

  • Customers are searching for information online;
  • The search engines index news releases sent through the newswires;
  • Therefore we should disseminate all our information in news release form to improve our discoverability. Even if it isn’t exactly, strictly speaking news.

I suspect if we did an analysis, we’d find a correlation between the decline in the quality of press releases with the rise of the search engines.

This has got to stop, full stop. We have got to get back to a model where the news release is about news — real, interesting, viable news — aimed at journalists covering that news. If customers, bloggers and search engines "find" our releases, that’s just fine, but we shouldn’t be writing our news for the search engines. That’s what leads to crappy releases with less than zero news value. With or without links.

Write your news release for the news media. If customers and bloggers find it through search engines, terrific. Consider it a bonus. But write news, not product brochures.

Write your website for your customers, and yes, for the search engines too. If you write a good site that sells your product effectively, it should be fairly well optimized for search. .

That way, when you sit down to write a customer communication, whether a customer newsletter or a blog pitch, you can focus on developing a story that connects with the customer. Not on shoehorning your communication into a format for which it is not suited.

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Preview of coming attractions:

Until today, this was pretty close to the worst pitch of the year:

Today, a friend forwarded one that absolutely tops it. In fact, it’s so pungent, I’m not sure anything can top it.

Once I find the words, you’ll find it here.

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Blogger Relations Hall of Shame

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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.

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