Mar 15

krempasky

7 Comments

On pitching. And whining.

  • Categories: PR

A few years ago, I used to help teach classes on grassroots organizing to young activists. Stuck in a hotel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, or Nashville, or Boston for 10 hours on a Sunday – the opening lecture would ALWAYS focus on one simple truth about communicating: if you give up your Sunday to hear lectures on nuts and bolts political organizing…YOU. ARE. NOT. NORMAL. And if you forget that for one tiny little moment, you’ll never be able to communicate to someone who is.

Which of course brings me back to this festering sore that is the PR blogosphere. Hand wringing! Sackcloth and ashes! Quick – everyone get out their best funeral black. Someone sent…emails. to bloggers. Gasp!

If you’re a PR professional who blogs – please discard the notion that you’re a normal blogger. You’re not. You’re hypersensitive to the Nth degree. You’re also probably not running a blog that sees north of five hundred visitors a day. (at least one new colleague excepted, of course.) You have NO idea what it’s like to get a lot of pitches (think about how many political campaigns are out there for a minute, not to mention the organizations that care about public policy – heck, I get pitches from real. live. journalists!) – and you have NO idea what it’s like out there on the interweb.

Do you have any idea how bloggers organized to deal with 60 minutes? Jeff Gannon? Trent Lott? Eason Jordan? Rodriguez and Morrison in Texas? The Federal Election Commission? Do you have any notion of what it looks backstage? From the looks of much of the aforementioned handwringing…I’d say the answer is a resounding…”Eason who?”

Once again, step back. Take a deep breath. And read blogs not written by folks who were flacks before Cam Barrett started writing his blog.

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7 comments so far

  1. Kami Huyse

    March 15th, 2006 at 10:42 pm

    Reminder, most bloggers don’t see North of 500 unique visitors a day, it is called the long tail. However, I am glad you got it off of your chest. And, it does help to deconstruct this, as it will mean a lot to the PR campaigns some of us are in the midst of considering.

  2. Emily Melton

    March 16th, 2006 at 1:55 am

    Even though the blogosphere is rapidly growing, it’s still a very niche community. A majority of my friends still have no idea what blogs are, much less that they are used in a professional context. It would “bloggle” their minds to know the depth that blogs are being utilized. (Horrible pun, I know, but once the thought came to mind, I had to do it.)

    The point I’m trying to make is that you are correct about us not being normal. Anyone who knows enough to read your blog isn’t normal. As far as the Wal-Mart drama goes, I think that people wanted to have something sensational to jump on in the blogosphere, and that was the unfortunate victim. If it happened in any other context, things would probably be said, but nothing like this.

  3. Thomas Graham

    March 17th, 2006 at 12:24 am

    Luv ya, and luv ur attitude!

  4. Alan Weinkrantz

    March 17th, 2006 at 8:02 am

    Hmmm….well, we are a PR firm, and yes- I blog. We recently were engaged by a client with the objective of having the product reviewed in a very niche market where we discovered some very interesting and passionate bloggers. We pitched (through email) 40 bloggers, of which 10 responded with “thanks,” “sounds cool…send it along,” “if this works as promised, I’ll do a great review,” etc.

    A few observations from this process….

    1. Few, if any of any of the bloggers we pitched list phone numbers in which we can make a quick call.
    2. Our pitches were short and to the point. No attached files. No long-winded claims.
    3. We only went after the top ranked blogs and the ones that we felt were the best written, who posted often, and had a certain editorial fabric that showed they were passionate about what they wrote.
    4. We asked permission and thanked them and thanked them for considering our pitch.

    While you may receive too many emails from PR firms, that may be one of the casualties of being “open” or being in too broad of a market. I believe the more narrow the niche, the fewer the bloggers, and ironically, the greater the market opportunity.

    As of now, our client’s product has been shipped for review- and (through email) we are continuing the dialogue as their testing and evaluation proceeds.

    Hint: the client’s product has something to do with making the experience of wearing high heels much more comfortable.

  5. Kami Huyse

    March 17th, 2006 at 1:12 pm

    Alan; I would love to hear about this once you get some results and feedback. How will you measure success. Product sold, positive results, etc.

  6. Alan Weinkrantz

    March 17th, 2006 at 5:02 pm

    Kami….we are having lunch on May 1. Will update you then. This is sort of funny. We met a bloggers. We live in the same town. Our schedules kept colliding. We finally settled on a date we can both agree on – 6 weeks from now…..

    Anyway, will keep you posted on how this goes.

    AW

  7. Kami Huyse

    March 19th, 2006 at 3:08 pm

    Blogger meetup in SA. I’ll be looking forward to hearing about it!

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