spreading jam

Here at Jam, we pride ourselves on caring about bloggers, generating content that’s genuinely of interest to them and in return doing a great job for our clients. Whilst we could write about best practice from an agency perspective until the cows come home (that’s a long time, trust me), we thought it would be interesting to get input from the other side of the fence. Martin Bryant of The Next Web kindly offered to give his candid views. So without further ado, grab a cuppa and enjoy…

Hey PR people, here’s how to work with bloggers without really annoying them

I love PR people. They help bridge the gap between interesting, but not always media-savvy, tech companies and the press. Quite simply, they give me things to write about.

That said, every day, flacks lose out on any chance of winning coverage for their clients by approaching journalists and bloggers in a way that puts us right off. They probably don’t mean to be annoying, but they manage it nevertheless. So, at the risk of sounding like a patronising bore telling you lot how to do your jobs, here are some tips that can help you end up in my ‘Covered’ email folder, rather than the ‘Uncovered/Rejected’ one (yes, I keep rejected press releases – I’m odd like that).

While I’m using examples from the tech world here, these tips should apply to any area of the media that you may be pitching to.

Be personal but not creepy

In most cases, generic emails are bad. All the best PRs I can think of send me emails personally.

When you’re doing PR for the big boys like Facebook, Microsoft or a genuinely ‘hot’ tech company that lots of people are writing about regularly, you’ll be forgiven mass mailing because journalists will usually be happy to lap up your news (as long as it’s good). However, you’ll almost certainly get better results if you take the time to learn a bit about the journalists you want to target. Are they likely to be interested in the kinds of products you’re promoting? Check their personal Twitter account – what’s their personality? Does it look like a formal approach or a casual one would work better with them?

It’s easy to go overboard on this though. Personally targeting bloggers and journalists who are most likely to want to write about your product can occasionally turn into borderline stalking. “Hi, I saw that you wrote about location apps recently. I also saw your tweet about a cat you saw in the street. Oh, and I checked out your personal Flickr account and saw that you visited a bar in New York last year – the woman to your left is HOT, is she your wife? Anyway, I think you’ll love my client’s check-in app for finding hot women who like Manhattan cats.” Seriously, I’ve received emails almost as over the top as this from people who have never contacted me before. They just come across as… well, creepy.

The best relationships with PRs are where I’ve met them in person. That’s not always possible, but there’s something genuinely useful about being able to put a name to a face. While it would be a rare and strange breed of journalist who turned down a good story pitch because they didn’t know the sender, your email will certainly stand out from the crowd if you’re known. If you can’t meet your target bloggers or journalists face-to-face, get to know them on Twitter. Chatting in a natural way about subjects completely unrelated to your client can be a good way to get yourself remembered for the future when you’ve got something good to pitch.

Put the product first

Until we have a reason to care, we don’t want to hear about your client. Your client may well be amazing but bloggers aren’t likely to want to schedule a call with a CEO they’ve never heard of just on the off-chance that we might be interested in what they do. Far too often, the first time I hear of a company is in an email inviting me to speak to the CEO. While I love to meet new people, I have deadlines to meet and stories to write. Tying up half an hour of my time to talk to someone who may not be relevant to me just in case one day I want to write about them just isn’t possible in most cases.

Give us the product pitch or the news first – that’s our reason to care, as it’s something we can write about. From there, we might want to schedule a call with the CEO to find out more, but as an opening gambit, the invitation to call is probably doomed to fail. On a related note, trying to wedge your unheard-of client into our coverage of a current news story probably isn’t going to work either. Seriously, when have you read a news report that quoted the opinion of the unheard-of CEO of a no-name company that bore (at best) a slim relevance to the story itself? Never.

Be relevant

No-one likes junk mail. If you get known for sending irrelevant rubbish, it won’t stand you in good stead for getting a fair hearing when you have something really good to share. If you send a technology journalist or blogger a story designed to promote garden gnomes, you’re probably going to have made an enemy. With numerous press releases hitting our inboxes every hour, irrelevant rubbish is a waste of valuable seconds. That might not sound like long, but trust me – all those unnecessary emails can quickly add up, and the more time I’m spending dealing with them, the less time I’m actually doing my job.

It’s not just the garden gnome-type stuff, either. If you’re targeting a consumer-focused publication with a dry B2B product that clearly has no consumer interest angle whatsoever, you’re wasting everyone’s time, including your own. Get to know the publications that you target regularly by reading them regularly and you’ll get to know which stories are likely to be of interest to each.

Be bold but not pushy

I get it – you want to get your story published but if you get turned down, it’s probably because the blogger you were pitching to decided that it wasn’t for them. Seriously, leave it at that. Plugging away at the same story with alternative angles over multiple emails is likely to annoy and smacks of desperation.

Cold pitching by phone is a really bad idea too, unless you’ve established that your target blogger is definitely happy with it. You know that phone call you get at home every now and then, asking if you’d like to take part in a short marketing survey? Cold pitching by phone is just as annoying as that and puts your client’s product in a bad light instantly.

Respect our ethics

‘Blogger ethics’ vary from individual to individual, but generally they’re all about respect – for other bloggers but most importantly for readers. Suggesting story ideas that are designed to deceive readers will likely backfire on you. Just take a look at PR firm Burson-Marstellar, whose attempt at persuading a blogger to write a negative story about Google (on behalf of client Facebook) ended in a significant reputation knock for both the PR firm and Facebook itself.

I never take up ‘Why don’t you do a negative story about X company?’ stories suggested by PRs. They smell bad, and I’m capable of writing negative posts off my own back when I feel they’re necessary – that’s rarely when they’re being produced in the interests of another company.

Live your market, love your market

I can always tell the PR folk who love the tech scene, and nowhere does it show more (apart from maybe on their Twitter account), than in their press releases. If you don’t really ‘get’ tech, your press release copy may well be filled with meaningless buzzwords that seem to be used as an attempt to cover up the fact that you don’t really understand the subject.

An example of what I mean: “Blahtech Inc is set to transform the communications and business transactions markets with the launch of a revolutionary new solution aimed at third parties. This game-changing product, known as BlahMail™ uses unbelievable new techniques to oil the wheels of online voice-to-text and VoIP communication in a radical paradigm shift to the world of email…”

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?! I have no idea, and my eyes are getting so heavy from reading this babble that I want to shut down my computer and have a sleep. Your client’s product almost certainly isn’t ‘revolutionary’ or ‘game-changing’; superlatives are filler. Stick to the facts: tell us with enthusiasm what the product is and why we might like it. Leave the gushing praise to us – if we actually do like it.

A far better approach to the example above would be this: “Blahmail is the first service to hit the market that allows you to send and receive email using nothing but your voice.” It’s shorter and simpler… and my head doesn’t hurt when I read it.

Let’s work together

So there you go, these are just a handful of pointers, and I know that I’m opening the door to PRs writing posts telling journalists how to be less annoying to them. In fact, I’d welcome that – we work together in this business, so let’s get our gripes about each other out there and just get on with our jobs in a way that makes life easier for everyone.

What are your thoughts? Do you have experiences? Are you a blogger that’s always getting pestered or a PR that has their own views? We’d love to hear from you, use the comments below!