{"id":516,"date":"2008-06-13T19:08:15","date_gmt":"2008-06-13T23:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/?p=516"},"modified":"2008-06-13T19:08:15","modified_gmt":"2008-06-13T23:08:15","slug":"fixing-blog-pitches-that-just-miss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/2008\/06\/13\/fixing-blog-pitches-that-just-miss\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing blog pitches that *just* miss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Almost.<\/strong> As the saying goes, almost only counts in  horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear war. If your blog pitch is *almost* good enough, it&#8217;s not good enough. So what does <em>almost<\/em> look like in blogger relations? <\/p>\n<p>Here are some examples, direct from my inbox.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" height=\"416\" style=\"margin: 5px\" width=\"548\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/\/\/i0.wp.com\/getgood.typepad.com\/getgood_strategic_marketi\/10June_nearmiss.jpg?resize=548%2C416&#038;ssl=1\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s wrong, in order of appearance, not importance:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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?<\/li>\n<li>&quot;Hey&quot; is not an acceptable form of address, as far as I am concerned, for people you don&#8217;t know. If the sender had been reading my blog, she would have known that I wrote about this VERY recently. She&#8217;d also know that I am writing this series about good and bad pitches, and perhaps taken a bit more care with this one.<\/li>\n<li>The worst problem with this pitch is that it doesn&#8217;t tell me why *I* should care. I&#8217;ve been included in a wide net, a general outreach to marketing and advertising bloggers; the assumption is that we&#8217;ll figure out why we are interested in this widget.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Why didn&#8217;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&#8217;t give me enough information to know whether I am interested, but at least it isn&#8217;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&#8217;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.]<\/p>\n<p>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. &quot;Hi&quot; or &quot;Hello&quot; instead of &quot;Hey.&quot; 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8230;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 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Second, you have to fill in the &quot;because&quot; with something a bit more substantial than &quot;you have a blog in a certain content area.&quot; 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: &quot;we thought you might be interested because you have written about company x&#8217;s social media projects in the past.&quot; I&#8217;ve masked it, but this is a big company that many social media marketing bloggers have written about.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>One fiinal comment: the little PS about transparency does seem like overkill, at least as far as this  pitch is concerned. There really isn&#8217;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&#8217;m also a little offended by the &quot;please feel free&quot; language. You betcha. If I were going to write about this product for real, I&#8217;d have no problem identifying the players. No need to offer dispensation \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;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&#8217;t connect with the blogger&#8217;s interests; it just delivers the pitch.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" height=\"273\" style=\"margin: 5px\" width=\"468\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/\/\/i0.wp.com\/getgood.typepad.com\/getgood_strategic_marketi\/anothernearmiss_1.jpg?resize=468%2C273&#038;ssl=1\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I emailed the rep back and asked what led her to send the pitch to me. My exact words:<em> Just wondering, what led you to send this pitch to me? <\/em>Didn&#8217;t say whether I was interested or not. Here&#8217;s the answer:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" height=\"42\" style=\"margin: 5px\" width=\"446\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/\/\/i0.wp.com\/getgood.typepad.com\/getgood_strategic_marketi\/reason_1.jpg?resize=446%2C42&#038;ssl=1\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>That would be my confirmation that I&#8217;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&#8217;t. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s a near miss, and we ain&#8217;t playing horseshoes. <\/p>\n<p>All the PR person had to do was make a connection to the marketing topics I&#8217;d covered in the past. In both cases, it wasn&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>The common reply to this criticism is that the agencies don&#8217;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 &#8211; generally when the product is just so awesome it makes up for the crappy pitch &#8212; but it doesn&#8217;t work all the time. Or even most of the time. <\/p>\n<p>Make the effort. <\/p>\n<p><small>Tags: <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/blogger+relations\">blogger relations<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost. As the saying goes, almost only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear war. If your blog pitch is *almost* good enough, it&#8217;s not good enough. So what does almost look like in blogger relations? Here are some examples, direct from my inbox. Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s wrong, in order of appearance, not importance: Sent from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}