Last night I accompanied two of the founders of Shiny Media, Chris Price and Katie Lee, to Fullrun’s Talking Shop event, which was a Consumer Blogging Roundtable. (If you work in PR and haven’t been to one of these  yet, I can’t recommend them highly enough)

Peter Kirwan opened by asking the panellists what are their tips for PRs to pitch to them? Some pretty common things cropped up which I’ve pulled into a list below.

I guess it’s important to mention these bloggers are some of the big boys in the UK: CNET’s Crave, Dennis publishing, Future’s tech.co.uk, and Shiny Media’s Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest. They come from a journalistic background and blog in a full-time professional capacity, plus the tech blogosphere seems much further along with starting to deal with PRs.

We wouldn’t recommend anyone take these tips as a rule of thumb on engaging all bloggers - but bear in mind if any of these guys are on your press lists.

1. Exclusives – everyone loves them. If offering one, send first thing in the morning so they can get it ASAP and build traffic to that post over the course of the day
2. Subject headers - the nature of blogging means they get 100s of emails a day. Make *yours* stand out with a clear header and key info in the first line
3. Immediacy is key – get them all info: inc images (yep, breaking the cardinal PR rule!), quotes, links to website, in your first email to them. They’re more likely to write about it there and then rather than following up with your team
4. Images – bloggers need them. Make sure you have some good ones available or a link to press images on the corporate website (beware sending high-res and clogging up someone’s Inbox)
5. Timing – if you still have clients who stagger announcements across markets, when you contact UK based bloggers, you’ll need to have something UK specific for them e.g. UK image, pricing, stockist, availability, UK company quote
6. Beyond news stories – give bloggers the time and opp to do something fun with your story. All there last night said they’re happy to work to NDAs as it gives them time to create a stronger story rather than racing against each other to post it first. Think creatively, how do they write? What’s something fun you could do with them?

There’s was quite a lot of discussion around Events I’ve bulleted them out below:

Events

• Don’t invite a blogger to an event and then send out the release while they’re in transit, that means another blogger who didn’t attend can scoop them
• Make sure your venue is set-up for them, consider: wireless (for live-blogging & posting), conditions for shooting video/images (too dark, too noisy leaves them with nothing usable), a chance to handle product and talk to execs
• Make key execs available in an appropriate location for them to be interviewed (as above)
• Don’t make bloggers feel 2nd best. Calling them the day before, to say that you have a couple of spaces to fill after some print press pulled out, would be insulting to anyone!
• Many bloggers write for on and offline titles. Be clear for which role you’re inviting them and be prepared they’re more likely to blog about your product/company/service. If you aren’t willing to invite them as an influential blogger in their own right – you might need to educate yourselves or your client on the impact blog coverage can have vs. glossy magazine status
• Also, be clear if inviting them, personally, or someone from the blog to attend (most of the larger blogs have teams of people working on them) it can be uncomfortable to have to ask a PR if they can send someone else in their place. Read the blog to be sure whether the invite’s right for the blog or a particular writer (everyone pointed out their writers’ details are on the websites)

All in all it was a great event and I’ve had a bit of fun being on the blogger side of things by racing Leo Ryan from RMM London to see who could post these tips first

- Darika

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 10:08 am by Lewis Webb and is filed under PR and Marcomms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.