Marketing Roadmaps

PR

PR Tip: How to engage with bloggers

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How should PR people engage with bloggers? It isn’t rocket science. It’s simple common sense.

Leaving aside questions of citizen journalism, rules of engagement, codes of ethics and all that philosophical stuff …. which I will get back to in a later post….

If you are a company that would like to reach out to bloggers in the hopes that they might write about your product or service, what and how should you do it? Here’s my little prescription.

1. Research: identify the relevant blogs and start reading them regularly. Get to know the blogger — what does she like, what kind of blog does he write? If a blogger links out a lot, and has a wide variety of interests, it’s more likely that he will be interested in your stuff. If her blog is just her ruminations about stuff, with few links and outside material, less likely.

2. After you’ve been reading the blogs for while, figure out which ones make sense to include in your announcements. It shouldn’t be all the bloggers who write about the topic. It should ONLY be those bloggers who you think will be interested. From reading the blog, you also ought to have a decent idea of their readership. Blogs with lots of comments, good clue to an engaged readership 🙂

Then, send the bloggers a brief note, identifying yourself, your company and products, and ASK PERMISSION to send them company news and announcements. Do not do this as a mass mailing — if should be an individual email, and personalized to some degree. Remember — you’ve been reading the blog, so you ought to be able to refer to something relevant that will let the blogger know this wasn’t a mass email.

if you’ve done your research properly, you will hear back from them. Some will say "no" but if you’ve targeted right, odds are, most will say yes. The simple fact that you ASKED FIRST will go a long way.

Then it is up to you to make sure you only send relevant announcements to your blogger reporters and continue to read their blogs. Stay engaged, and treat them with the respect they deserve. After all, they are reporters who can help you reach others, and they are your customers.

Personally, I can’t think of a more important audience. Get it right the first time. You may not get a second chance.

9/28/06: Comments and trackbacks closed due to spam

Public Relations ROI. Fact or Oxymoron?

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Does PR work, and how do you measure it? That’s the topic this week over at the Revenue Roundtable. Here’s my post kicking off the discussion — hope you join in at the Roundtable.

Got your attention?

To not waste time, I’ll tell you my opinion right up front. I believe PR works and can be one of the most effective tools in your marketing arsenal. For more background, read my post on how to define a good pr strategy.

The problem is: how do you prove it? As with its more glamourous sister, Advertising, it is often hard to trace a lead back to the PR campaign that may have generated it.

And, unfortunately, many PR firms deflect the request to prove it with fat clip books as a measure of increased brand awareness. Which doesn’t answer the question: is the Public Relations effort delivering prospects?

When I was at SurfControl, we tracked PR hits against downloads of trial software from the company Web site. After a major hit, downloads increased by a significant factor, for about 2-5 days, depending in the breadth and depth of the coverage, and then returned to normal levels. Proof positive of a definite relationship between PR and leads.

What do you do in your business to measure public relations?

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Check out the Selling to Big Companies blog by one of my colleagues on the Roundtable, Jill Konrath. She recently posted about a freeware tool called Bullfighter that will help you clean out the jargon from your written communications.

Marketing Roadsigns newsletter

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Yes, I too have decided to launch a monthly newsletter. Since it will be a companion piece to the Roadmap, it will be called Marketing Roadsigns. You can sign up here on the Roadmap and on my website www.getgood.com

First issue will be sometime this week, and it will be archived on the website.

Update: July 2005 issue posted.

Roadmaps Round-up: decision making, pitching bloggers and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

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Finishing up with my blogroll for this week:

From Andrew Lark, Tomcruiseisnuts.com I needed something light after the news of the bombings in London, and this fit the bill.

Another great post from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users – You’re emotional. Deal with it. She covers the surprising news (VBG) that decisions are most often based on emotions, not logic, regardless of how we choose to justify the decisions. Of course this won’t be a surprise to marketing folks and most women I know, but news like this just might rock the world of a few tech CEOs.

Tom Murphy has an excellent post that lists posts from PR bloggers on the right (and wrong) ways to pitch bloggers. The post that triggered his, from Anil Dash, on how not to pitch a blogger, closed with an admonition about my favorite peeve: PDFs. About four weeks ago, I ripped into someone (privately) who sent me a pitch about a book with at least 3 PDF attachments plus a huge graphic in the HTML email.

Get a simple website, people, post your information there, and include the links in your emails. If you don’t have the technical ability to do this, find someone who does, like a college student or fourth grader. The people getting your pitch — whatever it is — DO NOT want their email bogged down with tons of attachments that they DIDN’T ASK FOR!!!!! It doesn’t matter whether they are on dial up, broadband, corporate network or a blackberry. They don’t want ’em.

BONUS RESOURCE FOR US FOLKS: If you don’t have your own child to help you with this tech stuff, techstudents.net can help you find a college student to do this work for you.

Also from Tom Murphy, I learned about changes Gartner is making to the infamous Magic Quadrant and a new blog (new to me that is): Analyst Equity.

We’ll have to see how it plays out, but I don’t really see how these "changes" are going to make the whole Magic Quadrant process any less capricious. It still sounds like a "black box" where the analyst doing the Quadrant will decide the key elements based on his or her own opinions and biases, and the companies involved will have a devil of a time figuring it all out.

Public relations – measuring results, managing media. Plus a word on corporate blogging

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Happy Independence Day!

After this post, I am going to take TypePad’s advice and take a blogging holiday over the weekend while they upgrade the software. But I have been holding onto a few things that will be REALLY old by Tuesday. So while they are still sort of blogworthy, here goes.

First, I seem to be on a PR tack lately, and this topic is no exception. A few weeks ago, Sam Whitmore co-hosted the Hobson & Holtz Report, and threw a couple of topics out to the audience for comment. I listened to the show while traveling out of town, and with this and that, haven’t been able to get to my thoughts until now.

The first issue was PR measurement and budget preservation. Sam commented that in order to preserve PR budgets, it seemed that MarComm and PR folk needed to do a better job of quantifying PR results. He also mentioned a PR agency that was in fact promoting its ability to demonstrate ROI.

The key I think is that marketers have got to look at PR as part of an integrated marketing plan, and look at the impact of the PR activities on sales, not just on brand awareness. In other words, count leads, not clips.

When I was at SurfControl, we tracked PR hits against downloads of trial software from the company Web site. After a major hit, downloads increased by a significant factor, for about 2-5 days, depending in the breadth and depth of the coverage, and then returned to normal levels. Proof positive of a definite relationship between  PR  and leads. Now, if I could have only gotten the sales reps to actually ask the prospects where they heard of the product….

The other topic Sam raised was to ask whether professional media training has created executives who are better at managing the media than the reporters are at conducting the interview. He pointed to an example in the tech trades where two pubs ran eerily similar stories about a tech company … down to the same headline … as proof that the executive being interviewed was clearly more in control of the story than the reporters who were covering it.

I could have this wrong, but it seemed that Sam’s point was that professional media training, which has created these execs who stay on message, is ruining the media, making it impossible for reporters, who don’t have the luxury of the same training, to get the real story.  I just don’t think that’s right.

There is a difference between not answering a question (dodging) and staying on message. The company exec (and her PR firm) have a responsibility to the company to tell the story it wants told. They should answer direct questions but as long as they answer the actual question before moving on to their point, it is wrong to fault them for staying on message. 

It is the journalist’s job to conduct the interview, ask the tough questions, get the answers and write an original story. Most journalists of my acquaintance do this. We all understand the rules of engagement, and do our jobs.

If reporters take shortcuts and don’t do their homework, don’t ask the tough questions, and rely too heavily on a press release or company statements, versus their own instincts, they just aren’t doing their job. The one the readers expect them to.

The answer isn’t to stop training company executives to be better communicators. It is to maintain journalistic standards. Perhaps, as Sam suggested, journalists should be exposed to the same communications training that their subjects get. I think that’s an excellent idea; the J-schools and the publications themselves should both explore this idea.

But don’t blame the company communicators for doing their jobs. Of course, media training helps the exec do a better job in the interview. That’s why we do it.  And we aren’t going to stop.

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Over at PR Communications, John Cass has released the results of his corporate blogging survey.

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Finally, it is my birthday next week and my husband gave me my present early. As I went to the store with him last night to get it, seemed silly to wrap it and wait until Tuesday. So anyway, my iPod is off the s*** list and I am loving my new Bose SoundDock. Tomorrow, we’ll be packing up boxes and boxes of CDs for storage.

Happy holidays everyone. Stay safe, and enjoy fireworks and alcohol responsibly (and not together). See you Tuesday.