Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

Guidelines for Pitching for Bloggers

by Rachel on September 12th, 2007

Something that this blog has turned to a few times is pitching bloggers (Tom being targeted all the time and how not to pitch a blogger). In the past week, PR professionals have come out with guidelines about how to pitch, the best way to get your message heard.

First up, via David Meerman Scott, are tips on how to pitch a blogger from Mark Hinkel. Paraphrased, they are:

• Format the news in a way that is easy for the blogger to use - include links
• Make the story relevant
• Make the information friendly and informative
• Be wary of using embargoes
• Develop the relationship. There’s a lot of stuff here that needs to be read well and paid attentions to!
• Be effective and be genuine

All great tips for you to think about.

Meanwhile, Ogilvy PR has been busy listening to the growing list of complaints from bloggers (partly triggered but the mommyblogger debate at Blogher) and has codified what is best practice for them. They are currently taking feedback - so please comment here or on their blog. Here’s the full list:

Ogilvy PR’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

There’s an interesting debate in the comments on that post, as a blogger replies with her own code of ethics and mentions about paying for the mention by buying media. Others chime in about compensation for reviewing or being involved in research This is an area that I’m extremely uncomfortable with as I believe that advertising and editorial needs to be separate. This is why paid reviews, on PayPerPost and other sites get such bad press, because the paid commentary gets mixed in with other stuff. But, having being exposed to PR, I’m fully aware that many, many journalists get things from agencies and companies for spending time being pitched to, even if it as simple as a cookie. There’s an interesting balance here - you can;t review a product without a sample, which may come in a ’special’ pack, but how far beyond that do you go into paid media?

The combined statements about only approaching a blogger is there is something that they think is good and being upfront in disclosing if they have not read the blog are contradictory. As bloggers, maybe we should be a bit more upfront with what we want to be pitched, the types of subjects, but if that is not there they have to have read the blog and got an understanding of what I like - and if they have not read the blog, how can they know what is interesting.

I love this list, it’s a great start - a pretty good codification of how to go about developing a relationship with a blogger OR just contacting them for short-term PR. Taken together, the information here should be enough for anyone to go about this in the right way ;)

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POSTED IN: Advertising Agencies, Blogging and Blogs, Buzz Marketing, Engaging the Customer