Tips For Working With Bloggers

Above: Showtime nails it by sending out these super creative weed bouquets to media agencies promoting the premiere of Season 3 of their hit series Weeds. This is the kind of thinking that needs to go into blogger pitches!

Working with bloggers is an area I concentrate on, and one thing I perpetually hear from bloggers is that companies and agencies often put little to no effort into their pitches. This is an area that marketers need to drastically improve upon. Most of the bloggers that are receiving these pitches are getting tons of requests from others, and they understand how valuable their blog coverage is so they’re not just gonna write a review for a company that doesn’t know their name or just fires them a poorly thought out email.

Common Examples:

1. Company X sends a package to a bunch of bloggers with a letter that reads “Dear Blogger” instead of taking the extra time to address them personally. Sure they sent the blogger some swag, but where’s the love?!
2. A mass email goes out to a harvested list of top bloggers, again no personalization… And nothing tangible to see or touch, no press release, no marketing material, just a “hey – would you like to review our product? because it’s awesome”…. Yeah… No it really isn’t. And opening an email that says “Dear First Name” is a major SNAFU.
3. X agency sends a personalized email to a blogger and blows sunshine up their ass with a load of crap about how great their blog is and what a good fit it is for their regional promotion in Toronto… Problem is, blogger is in Iowa. Duh!

So those are just 3 examples of major mistakes that happen all the time. I could rhyme off a dozen others, but the point here is not to point out stupidity, but more to help prevent it.

If you are planning on pitching a blogger, take some advice from a blogger and marketer.

• Take 5-10 minutes to read a few posts on their blog. Where are they from? What is their blog about? You know… Things you should probably know if you are gonna ask them to review your product.

• If you are going to send them an email, send them more than a standard mass email about how great your product is. Tell them WHY your product is a good fit for their blog.

• If you have a product – send it to them! I know this sounds stupid and obvious… But you’d be surprised!

• Don’t stalk them about whether they’ve made a decision, or when the post will be up. Instead include flexible date parameters in your pitch and trust that their post will fall between those dates.

• And finally, the MOST important one of all… Don’t try to influence their review!! Your opinion is BIAS, you think your product is great because you get paid to think that. Let the blogger express their own opinions and views about it. If they say something negative, don’t sweat it. Consider it market intelligence!

Remember bloggers are creative, opinionated, and intelligent people. They appreciate a little bit of thought and originality, and it could mean the difference between them being happy to review your product on their blog and them totally flaming you for your horrible etiquette.

Have fun out there!

150 Million Active Users & Climbing

Congratulations to Facebook for reaching an amazing milestone of 150 million active users around the world! I learned (reading their blog post) that Facebook is available in more than 35 languages and 170 countries and territories.

Since their interface changed (and despite the protest from the change-resistent folks) the platform has become a lot better. I have personally noticed that I am not being as inundated with application requests and other silly little games and chatchke that I’m not really that interested in. It begs the question though, have application developers felt the burn since they changed their platform? Have people become less-engaged in the apps & has the novelty worn off?I’d be interesting in hearing from developers about whether they’ve noticed a change at all since the switch. My guess would be yes, but that is based on my own engagement. Now that my apps are in a neat little box out of the way of my profile, I often forget about them. I can’t remember the last time I sent a piece of flair or drew some graffiti.

The profiles were starting to look a bit MySpacey and tacky before they changed to the new layout, so I commend Facebook for noticing this and making the change quickly to avoid looking as awful as MySpace and keeping the content organized!

The Reason Why Marketers Have the Hardest Jobs

Check out this video I “stumbled” upon. It is absolutely mind-blowing and really puts things into perspective in terms of the warp speed that we are evolving at technologically and just as a species. It’s no wonder that marketers heads are spinning trying to keep up with the changes happening in our society. They are happening so fast that by the time they figure it out, something else has come along and everything is different. I really enjoyed this. Hopefully you will too.

Selina