Pitching To Bloggers The Right Way
Many of us are happy to help a product or service we like, support a cause, tell an amazing story and links to sites we find valuable–for little to nothing in return. All it takes is one direct message on Twitter, IM or e-mail. If you can do it right, that is.
One wouldn’t imagine that’s so difficult, but apparently, it is.
YOU DUMB PITCH
A beef jerky company once sent Melissa, a blogger at The Stirrup Queen, several requests for her to try out their product despite the fact that her blog banner at the time stated clearly that she was a kosher vegetarian.
At lalawag, an L.A.-based blog about tech gossip and entertainment, editor-in-chief Laurie Percival gets ridiculous requests all the time from people who have obviously never taken a minute to look over the site. From religious books to album releases to where celebs are eating this weekend, lalawag gets it all. Little slip-ups like that generate a couple of chuckles, at worst some eye rolls.
But misguided pitches can be extremely hurtful, too.
“The ones I find the most upsetting come from those asking me to hawk their baby product, pregnancy product, or breastfeeding product,” Melissa tells me over e-mail. “What part of the ‘unable to have a baby’ fact of the infertility blogosphere are they missing?”
For someone writing about a personal journey like Melissa, one full of sadness and hardship, lack of attention on the part of someone pitching is abusive.
“I had two marketers at the [BlogHer] conference tell me that they could help me tweak my diet so I could remain pregnant,” she told me. “That it was all tied to the fact that I wasn’t drinking the right energy drink or eating the right foods. The first one I ignored. The second one I said, ‘you know, I think my doctor is right that my clotting factor is responsible for those dead babies.’ And–I am not kidding you–she paused and said, ‘well, the drink will give you better bones.’”
There is a great piece by Hugh MacLeod that summarizes my feelings about this:
Drawing by Hugh MacLeod.
It’s lucky most pitches happen over e-mail or there would be a lot of black eyes in that industry.
PITCHING IT RIGHT
Liz Gumbinner, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Cool Mom Picks gets irrelevant pitches all the time, too. That seems to be the one bone most bloggers have to pick.
“We like PR people we have relationships with–who get to know our blog (it isn’t real hard to figure out our niche) and pitch us relevant ideas,” says Gumbinner. “Brownie points if they address us by name and not ‘Dear mommy blogger,’ which is the worst. They don’t take it personally if we don’t respond and they don’t follow up fourteen times. The good ones know we’ll get back to them when we’re interested, and when we do, we’ll do a great, honest, and thorough job on the post.”
“Why should we care about your product if you don’t take the time to look at our site and figure out what we’re about?” asks Laurie Percival, of lalawag.
Just then, I catch my friend Zach Behrens on IM. As editor of LAist, the guy goes through hundreds of e-mails a day. What makes a pitch pop?
“A good headline,” he answers. “Life or death. Think of it like Twitter: you only have a handful of characters to get your point across or you lose.”
Big fonts, exclamation points, all that stuff is distracting. A good 140-character elevator pitch is more successful than an e-mail that makes your eyes bleed.
“But really in the end, it’s about the relationship you’ve developed, too,” Behrens adds. “You see the name and think, ‘oh, I know that person I should open that e-mail.’”
That’s what it always comes down to–get to know the blog, get to know the people. Make sure your product is something that fits. It’s not just good business practice, it’s imperative.
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August 12th, 2009 at 7:50 am
I still can’t believe how many PR people still blindly pitch!
Peter´s last blog ..Research, Research Research
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August 17th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Too many PR people forget that the “R” stands for “Relations.” But this problem has been going on for years and years.
When I had an ad/PR agency in the pre-Web and early-Web years, we actually read the publications we pitched because we were interested in those industries. This meant we could have meaningful conversations with editors about the sectors they covered — and, when appropriate, mention the work a client was doing.
Cliff Allen´s last blog ..Tech Events in Southern California
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September 9th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
[...] The matter of disclosures as warning signs is not unfounded. It is up to every blogger and influencer to word their disclosures so these are fair, but the association with a brand can serve to make them experts in terms of this brand’s products, which can be useful for consumers when seeking specific information. It is a blogger’s and influencer’s responsibility to be informed about the products they support. For a company, it is important to reach out to bloggers and influencers whose personal brands reflect the product they’re trying to place (and this ties in to an earlier post I wrote Pitching to Bloggers the Right Way. [...]