PR

I hope everyone enjoyed the customer service series, and if in North America, had a great holiday week.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen at least one example of every poor blogger relations practice, so I thought I’d resume our discussion with a refresher on the mechanics of blogger outreach.That’s everything related to form and focus.

Later this month, we’ll get into making the secret sauce. Pitch content. How to develop a blog pitch that resonates with the intended audience like this one for Lucky Charms did for Mom-101.

1. Don’t spam. Try to determine if the blogger would be interested in your product or service. That still doesn’t mean he’ll respond, but it improves your chances from zero.

2. Follow up in reasonable timeframes. Not twice in the same day. And if the blogger doesn’t demonstrate any interest (or worse, makes fun of your pitch on her blog), don’t send a follow-up a week later. And another two weeks after that.  Just shows you aren’t reading the blogs you are pitching.

3.  Address the blogger by name. Not by her blog name, someone else’s name or as a database field, as in these two examples:

4. When a blogger responds to your pitch, even if it just to ask why you sent her the pitch, be courteous. Reply. And not just with a slapdash apology for the intrusion. Answer the question. If you don’t know why, why did you send the pitch in the first place?

5. Make sure the blogger could realistically attend the event to which you are inviting her. Don’t invite someone who lives in New York to an event in California unless you are planning to pay travel expenses, and please please don’t send a glowing update about an event to which the blogger was not invited. That’s just mean. Related: don’t barrage people with press releases about political campaigns that aren’t relevant. I may be a loyal Democrat and I might even be interested in a small tidbit about your race in Texas but neither of my blogs are political columns. I don’t want every damn release.

6. Include the relevant information. Nothing sillier than pitches with blanks or notes to <insert info here> If you offer samples, send them when promised, and don’t ask for them back. If your budget can’t afford samples, don’t offer them, or target even more narrowly so you can afford to give them to the bloggers that respond.

7. If you are offering products for contests, make it as easy as possible for the blogger and don’t offer stuff that has a limited audience. Gift certificates for a national restaurant chain, good. Gift certificates for a local restaurant, not so good for a blog with national (or international) reach, with certain exceptions. What’s an exception? A gift certificate awarded prior to a convention that the people entering the contest are attending.

8. Don’t include paragraph upon paragraph of product info. Keep it brief, and respond promptly to questions. Don’t answer a question with a canned response unless it is actually the answer to the question. Hint: it probably isn’t.

9. If the language your pitch is written in is NOT your native language, please have a native speaker read it before you send it. Really. This point enough I cannot be stressing. Okay, I made that up, but the following two screen captures are selections from a very long pitch for something called a balance bike, a toy that teaches young children how to balance before they face the problem of wheels. It sounds like an interesting product for young children but the pitch is nearly incomprehensible.

 Let’s just say, hoping I am that this person a native speaker of English not is.

10. Review the email to make sure it is all in the same typeface, size and color. Nothing says crappy pitch like a document that is clearly "cut and paste" from other docs. Especially since they usually also have poor grammar, missing information and database errors.

11. Press releases are links, not attachments. My personal pet peeve is press releases sent in the body of the email with no cover note. Extra demerits if it is included as an attachment as well.

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Some notes on my good pitch/bad pitch policies:

I intend to continue using screen grabs and blocking out product, company and agency names from the bad pitches.

If you are considering a PR agency, and would like to know if they have been included here as a bad pitch, call or email me. I will answer your yes/no question: Has agency X been included in a bad pitch post?  However, I will not provide a list of agencies that have been included in bad pitch. Don’t ask.

I do identify companies, products and PR reps on the good pitches. It is important to give credit where credit is due.

If you forward me a pitch you received, good or bad, I will not identify you by name without your permission.

Tags: blogger relations, bad pitches

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.

Tags: blogger relations, bad pitch

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.

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.

Tags: press release, news release, pr, public relations