Krempasky.com

• What if you were starting a PR firm and didn’t have access to media contact databases?
• What if you didn’t have access to circulation, readership, or viewership data?
• What if you knew that whatever media contacts you could find were more likely to either ignore your press releases or make fun of them publicly than actually use them to inform a story they wrote?
• On top of that, what if you were trying to build a PR practice – having never met anyone that worked in journalism?

In large part, I think that’s where most PR shops are right now when it comes to engaging the blogosphere. To be sure, there’s a lot of vendors to sell you lists, consultants to sell you advice, especially of the “silver bullet” variety – but are they really addressing those questions? I hardly think so.

Bloggers are a different thing altogether largely because of the absence of a consistent class. Eighty percent of them didn’t go to the same ten schools. They don’t share stories of professors, barely even share any common war stories from the trenches of their profession. It’s a rare thing to see the exchange of best practices among them that may lend some insight, and whatever insight you actually glean is made obsolete by the variety of the population.

Sure, it’s easy to ask questions, and make generalizations – but here’s one anyway: there is no silver bullet. There is no mass-marketing answer to solve all your problems, and communicating in volume is both dangerous and ineffective. In the end, it all comes down to shoe leather. Time consuming and resource consuming – but ultimately the only real approach. Personal connections common in the traditional media world need to be built from scratch.

And it’s those personal connections that will build reputations within this new medium. Are you to be trusted? Do you understand what makes bloggers tick and what just ticks them off? Do you get the most unwelcome moniker of spammer?

Remember: hit the bricks, there’s no quick fix.

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