THINKing

Pitching Bloggers

I was pretty hard on a so-called PR practitioner whose bad blog pitch went awry and got him into social media trouble. So, I thought perhaps we should take a crack at helping PR people who would like to pitch bloggers but don’t know how.

Ogilvy PR developed its own outreach code of ethics, which is a good starting place. Here are a few tips from the code:

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.

• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.

• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.

• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.

Here are a few other good articles on pitching bloggers that you may want to read before you tread onto this shaky social ground.

How Do I Get Placement On Blogs – Social Media Explorer

How To Pitch Bloggers – Problogger

The Myth of Cultivating Bloggers – Church of the Customer

Other Posts Of Interest

• Show Me Your Creativity
• Blog Juice
• Holiday For Charity Is Back
• Links – 5/22/2009
• Social Media Questions