Public relations professionals have it hard.
Bloggers are a snarky, unforgiving bunch. When you call us a f*&#%*g bitch, we mobilize half of the internet against you and your stupidity.
Really though, they bring this upon themselves.
In the past month, I was been put on a weird social media PR list. You’d think this would bring a blogger exciting new opportunities. Instead, it just brings headaches, links to piss poor social media research, and offers for guest posts on topics I don’t cover at all.
The only person who ever got it right offered to send me treats for my cat. How sad is that?
So, PR folks, let’s clear this up. Here are some tips for dealing with me and other bloggers.
- Get off Yahoo and Gmail - You want me to take you seriously? Great. But when you use a Gmail and Yahoo addresses for your email, I don’t take you seriously. Sorry, but it’s not terribly hard to set up a yourname@yourwebsite.com email address. Do it. I’ll take you more seriously to start with.
- Don’t ask to write a guest post - Don’t just presume because I run a blog and I’ve had guest posts featured previously that I’m looking to have you write a guest post. I don’t know you. I don’t know your writing. Giving me a list of generic topics like Facebook and Twitter isn’t helpful either. Either send me the article, or try to get to know me in a way that doesn’t promote your half-hearted PR business.
- Stop trying to get me to promote your content - I know it takes a lot of work to promote a blog and make content for it. I do it myself every. single. day. Your piss poor article about “5 ways to use Twitter for business” doesn’t interest me or my readers. And besides, I could write that article ten times in a more dynamic way than you could.
- Don’t waste my time - I have a job. I like to think that I have a life, but who am I kidding about that? Keep your email to the point. Also, don’t get your britches in a twist when it takes 48 hours for me to reply. I’m likely doing something so if we do work together, your efforts will be more successful.
- Don’t Assume - I got an email recently that read “This will interest you and your readers.” How dare you have the gall to know what interests me and my audience? If this is your first email to me and you’ve read one of my posts, you don’t know me or my readers.
- Say My Name - My name is all over this site. When you write “Dear The Anti-Social Media” or “Dear Blogger” you insult me as an author. Stop it. I’m Jay, use my name. Give me the respect I deserve. You wouldn’t write to J.K Rowling and start the letter with “Dear Author.” She’d go all “Avada Kedavra” on you.
Releasing that rage has me feeling better already,b but there’s still more than can be done. What else can PR professionals do better with blogger outreach? Leave a comment so we give them a post where they can learn where they are messing up and the chance to laugh at their own failures. Or if that isn’t fun, we can just make fun of all the horrible things we’ve seen.
Either way, we’ll all learn something about how not to piss off the people who control the interwebs.
You hit that nail right on its head. I would add “sucking up” to that list: Often enough a PR email starts off with telling you what a huge fan of your blog the sender is, which makes the fact that he doesn’t say your name, or doesn’t seem to quite know what it is you write about, come off all the more in his disfavor.
At some point I got tired of getting these bullshit emails and decided to give someone a lesson. This came out of it:
http://survivalfirst.tumblr.com/post/7820502558/what-a-marketing-email-should-not-look-like-picn
Cheers !
Wait, you don’t like people who grovel at your feet begging you to do something for them? Isn’t that the whole reason we became bloggers in the first place?
It’s worse when the “sucking up” is obviously fake. I had a PR pitch recently that said how much they loved my blog and how they’re looking for other outdoors bloggers and sportsmen/sportswomen to promote their product. Only one problem: I’m not an outdoors blogger. I’m not a sportsman. The closest I get to “outdoors blogging” is when I take photographs of the trees as they change color. (And that’s done outdoors in the city/suburban areas, not the country.) The PR person obviously didn’t do his research and just spray-pitched to a bunch of people.
It’s just as much fun when they don’t act like they enjoy it.
It;s funny that you published this today. I just went on a rant to some friends about getting a BS email from a scrapbooking company saying that they “love” my blog and wanted me to do a giveaway or something. My blog has nothing to do with scrapbooking. It would not make sense at all for me to do a scrapbooking software giveaway. Feh.
Just do it. Give away crap to the masses.
I get straight up spam from folks who want their link added to our library pathfinders/subject guides. I think the most memorable and sleazy one was from someone pretending to be an elementary school teacher. She talked about how her class found my webpage oh so useful, then dropped the bomb:
“Anyway, I also wanted to send you this email to show you a page my fourth grader (Amanda) found this morning while searching for pages that show kids that making healthy choices is important. She made the connection that this page would be a good addition to your page and asked me if we could ask you to add it. She thinks our bookmarks list is getting too long and it would help if your page had the new one we found so we didn’t have to add more to our bookmarks haha! (She is so cute!)
Sorry to be a pain I just thought it would be cute :)”
As a bonus, the person named the school they allegedly taught at- never mind that she didn’t appear in the school directory or use her professional government employee e-mail address.
PS: Sorry for pulling a Mashable since my comment had NOTHING to do with social media, but Fadi’s post got me RILED UP.
Blogs are totally social media. And you can talk about whatever you like in the comments. But only you.
Wow, talk about crappy SEO bait.
Lol, this is so funny. I have to agree with points 1, 4 and 5.
1) Receiving mails from a @hotmail.com or @gmail.com , selling me an idea sounds so fishy. I can’t even verify with a website. In fact, even a hosted website from your personal portfolio sounds more credible. Good advice there.
4) Since 48 hours isn’t appropriate , what is a good period to gauge interest? A good week? I guess it comes two way. I will feel more at ease if they gonna reply something like , “give us a week to think about it. If we don’t get back to you, then I guess to safe to say we are not interested. Nevertheless, all the best
”
5) Exactly. That is why at times cold-calling sucks. There is just so much info a website can showcase. But to get to the essence of the organization, you may need to actually drop by or even initiate a web-cam session .
I shared something similar - http://www.respectbloggers.com/2011/10/how-to-deal-with-a-pr-blunder-gone-viral/ - because that was purely ridiculous. If you have that feeling toward ANYONE you’re trying to work with, you’re in the wrong business. Mega fail.
That was so ridiculous. I secretly loved it.
Hi Jay -
Good article! As both a blogger and a PR guy, I couldn’t agree more. Basically, my rule of thumb is that your outreach should give the same respect and courtesy to bloggers that you would to a NY Times columnist: know who you’re talking to and tailor your pitch specifically to them and their audience. In other words, put the blogger’s interests before your own. It’s a bit more work in the beginning, but once you have that network of relationships up and running, it’s easy to get further potential “ink” online. Because then, you aren’t pitching, you’re collaborating.
Just one thing. Although I’m ashamed to admit it, I do use a gmail account. It’s a long story, but that’s just how I roll these days. To my knowledge, this hasn’t hurt my outreach efforts — maybe it’s because I try to get a few other things right — like spelling the blogger’s name correctly!
Joel
http://www.yearofsundays.com
http://www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com
Someone needs to do a case study about using a gmail account versus using a your name.com account. THAT would be useful data.
Though, I think a gmail account could be really useful for relationship building.
7. Know what you’re pitching — When someone piques my interest, I will usually have follow up questions. Please get answers rather than insisting that the only way I can help you in to speak with the CEO of your client. [Or worse, don’t just pitch that you have exciting news, provide no details, and the CEO can tell me all about it when he’s in town next week.]
Yeah, it’s annoying as hell when you do like a pitch, and then you have to wait 18 years to get a response from a completely different person who you don’t know.
I was kind of annoyed with this article because sometimes I wasn’t sure if you were the blogger who was being asked to PR something or if you were the person going to ask a blogger to do something. You seemed to write from two different perspectives which was confusing to me.
BUT, the good thing was that it gave me an idea to approach a blogger someday! But first I have to get to know the blogger I want to write about my company!
Thanks for that
Kristin
I can get that. I work in PR by day, so I see both sides of the issue, and sometimes It’s hard to split the dual personality.
And best of luck pitching that blogger! I hope this article starts as a great way to build your relationship with him/her.
Bellissimo! (in italian means great! beautiful!)
I agree with you and I will share your blog post :-))
bye
nelli
Grazie!
Dude, this is pretty good. I am a blogger and I have had the same exact shit happen to me. People need to get serious.
http://dirtyterry.wordpress.com/
Do it.
Keep up the good work, I am sharing this post.
TS
I have been reading about a rash of this bull crap and it is the stupidest thing in the world. Any “public relations professional” who does this should just hang it up and walk out into an ocean. This is beginner stuff here. It’s extremely aggravating to hear this continues to happen on a regular basis. You don’t even have to be trained in public relations to know that you don’t just blindly send out your shit to every email address on the Internet.
Maybe all people who think they want to be a professional communicator need to spend a few years being the receivers of god-awful pitches so they know what not to do.
I know! I have no “formal” pr training, and if I can do this stuff successfully, anyone can.
Well Jay your 1st suggestion is so arrogant it is whack, not take someone seriously because of a Yahoo or Gmail email address is just plain silly
I take people who use gmail or yahoo seriously. I don’t take professionals using a Gmail address who want me to use my blog as a platform to advance their client’s business goals seriously.
Awesome. I run a NING based site about Long Beach, CA, and I just have to add that sending lame ass “Press Releases” after lame ass “Press Release” about the latest weekend shopping sale or crappy ass and boring event is a “not to-do” too! - Whew, now I feel better too.
The you@yourdomain.com costs money and requires technical expertise beyond what most bloggers, I would say, have — the “professionals” usually have IT staff and marketing budgets to pay for a domain and hosting. I’m talking about the ones who are, for all intents and purposes, going it alone because they have to.
Besides, Gmail is a Google service just like Blogspot is. People do have serious and worthwhile blogs hosted on yourblog.blogspot.com domains: the feminist blog Shakesville; bestselling romance novelist Jennifer Weiner; literary agent Janet Reid; among others. Granted, the latter two do have official dot-com websites of their “own domain,” but still, not all Blogger blogs are necessarily spamfests or unprofessional (s)crapbook cat havens. It could be the person is using Gmail for convenience, as a Gmail often goes hand-in-hand with a Google account, which also includes Blogger, Picasa, and even YouTube.
Yahoo! remains popular if only for nostalgia and its stability as a recognized member of the WWW from the very get-go, around 1994 or so. It’s been around even longer than Google, which started in 1996 under a subdomain of stanford.edu. Gmail didn’t come till much later, post-Y2K in fact, but both have become well recognized domains for people to use as personal and professional email addresses. Hotmail and MSN are still worthy competitors in this field, and there are other regionalized services (sapo.pt, postmaster.co.uk, freenet.de, even mail.ru, etc.), with a large userbase in their respective countries.
So to write off a client simply because s/he doesn’t have a domain of his/her own strikes me as overly harsh. Perhaps that’s why they’re asking for the services of a professional writer, who might be able to improve the presentation of their content and maybe get them higher up in the rankings, thus with more resources to pool for things like design, analytics (whatever these things are), and even a domain name!