Lately, I have been hit by a bevy of bad PR pitches. They have about the same effect n me as eating bad clams. I am a recovering publicist, so I try to be gentle and encouraging to PR folk, even though I rarely write about a pitched company or topic. But this week, I know I got grumpy. Enough is enough.
So many of my favorite bloggers are PR folk. There are probably too many to mention. But Phil Gomes, Mike Manuel, Kami Huyse, Joe Thornley, Shel Holtz, David Parmet, Josh Hallett, and Chris Heuer are the first to come to mind. There are others, but I'm feeling link-lazy.
Many started blogging before or at about the same time as I did and, as far as I can tell, few of them reached prominence in their field before they became so immersed in blogging and social media. They figured out that the fundamentals of PR had shifted. Instead of pitching influencers, they could be influencers. They realized that while a hit in the times or at Scobleizer was nice, a hit in their own posts could have its impact as well.
Each of these players gave me hope that enough PR practitioners would understand and embrace the fundamental change in the PR practice. That their was greater PR impact in talking with client customers than sending them messages through traditional tactics.
But the taper off seems to be sharpening. My experience is that an increasing number of PR folk are trying to treat bloggers as media. They want to find the 3-5 highest ranked topical bloggers and get hits that can be converted to clips.
They've learned smarmy little tricks like telling bloggers that they consider the blogger influential. It takes little time for a blogger to realize the pitcher has never read the blog they are pitching.
Here's the real trick. Don't pitch the conversational network. Join it. start your own blog. Get into the social networks like Facebook. Send your own tweets. Be part of the conversation so that we bloggers can see who you are and what yo do and what you have to say.
Then when you say something that is useful or interesting to my readers, chances are I will link to you. If I write something, and you can add value to the conversation--new insight, new data, a different perspective, I will scurry to your blog and read you for a while. Kami Huyse did this to me a while back and I became a fan of her blog and recommend it to all sorts of people. When Kami & Josh launched Sea World's Roller Coaster blog, they didn't have to pitch me. I saw they had news that was relevant and I wrote about it because my audience would be interested. Any of the other bloggers listed above also have sufficient transparency and authenticity. If they wrote about a client, I would not need a pitch from them to be motivated to find a post that would be relevant to my readers.
In the end, that is where my loyalty rests. I write for the people who come here.
My point is this. PR fiolk have a huge new opportunity. They can now have actual relationships with the public. They can bring back what they learn i conversations to clients. That's the real value in blogger relations. The conversation means a great deal, the blogger rankings, in most cases, means very little.
