Russell Beattie, Yahoo! mobile evangelist and mobile blogger, has been ranting about PR people trying to hop on the blogging bandwagon. And when self-proclaimed blogging PR guru, Steve Rubel attempted to remonstrate, Russell’s attack got specific and personal, using a recent attempt by Steve’s company as a case study in how not to do things.

Russell’s main argument is that PR people are seeking to influence
(or even manipulate) bloggers and that’s a bad thing, per se. It leads
to a degrading of the quality of discussion between bloggers themselves
and everyone else involved in the conversation.

I do take Russell’s point and have had my own run ins with PR people, particularly when they leave comment spam.
Anyone who knows the first thing about bloggers would also appreciate
that comments are a particularly sensitive subject and would avoid them
like the plague.

However, I also think that a happy medium is perfectly possible and
I welcome approaches from all PR people - and indeed anyone seeking to
try to get exposure and coverage for products. However, there are big,
big caveats to that.

Here’s some of my thoughts on how to approach me if you want me to think about writing about your company or clients:

1. Targeting

PR is a marketing discipline and like any form of marketing should
be tightly targeted to the recipient. Anything that people send me
should be concerned with what I write about, which is primarily mobile
phones, but can include a fairly eclectic mix of other tech areas.

I am not interested in receiving information about other things
under any circumstances and may even be hostile - maybe publicly
hostile - if you send me stuff about (in no particular order) cat food,
cookery, space technology or lighting. These examples are selected from
my email inbox in the last month.

This isn’t a new thing and good PR agencies never send out
information which they think a journalist (in its most inclusive sense)
isn’t going to print.

It’s not just that though. It also has to be interesting to my
readers, in my view. So if you’ve changed your name from the ABC Mobile
Widget Company to the ABC Mobile Company, I’d rather you kept the
"news" to yourself. Again, this isn’t new, it’s something good PR
people do already and the best will even stand up to clients who insist
that they send out this kind of rubbish press release.

2. Comments

Never, ever try to use my blog’s comments to promote your products. No, that’s not ever. You have been warned.

3. Press Releases

I’m a blogger and my motivation for writing is difficult to isolate, but it’s not for the money. Well, not yet anyway

This means that unlike many journeyman journalists I’m doing it for
pride. Press releases were invented primarily to make journalist’s
lives easier and many releases are faithfully reprinted accordingly.
(Not all journalists do this, by any means).

This doesn’t apply to bloggers. We’re not looking for an easy life.
And we’re not very interested in the spin PR people often try to put in
press releases either. So personally, I’d hold back the press release,
or at the very least don’t make it the hero of your approach.

I’m far more likely to respond to a nice, short email with a link to
a website I might find interesting. Then I can make up my own mind and
draw my own conclusions. I’m also a little more likely to respond if the
email is from the CEO/VP Marketing of the company, rather than a PR
agency, if I’m honest, but that’s not mandatory. Hey, some of my best
friends are PR people

4. Know thy blogger

Unfortunately, there aren’t any shortcuts to this. Certain bloggers
are going to be more receptive to a PR approach than others. The only
way of finding out about this is to read and analyse blogs. This
includes the topics they cover, but also frequency and type of post
they write.

It’s pretty obvious to anyone who reads Russell Beattie that he’s
unlikely to respond to a PR approach - especially now But even
before his rant, I’d have said that he’s unlikely to be receptive, just
from the subjects he’s written about in the past. And the Microsoft
angle? Dear me, no. No, no and no again.

Some blogs also may be disproportionately influential within their
specialist sphere. In other words, they may be read by relatively few
people, but these readers are important, either because they’re powerful
within their companies or that industry, or they are other bigger
bloggers. Don’t forget that blogging is much concerned with linking to
other blogs, so if the right blogger picks up on your story, other
bloggers will discover it for themselves. Thus the original blogger
will have done all your work for you.

5. Respect

A little respect goes a long way. Don’t try to pretend you’re a blogging PR expert - there’s two reasons for this.

i) No one is, right now. We’re all learning how to get along, so let’s be honest about this.

ii) If you haven’t got a (successful) blog yourself, you won’t
understand. So anyone who claims to know about this area had better be
able to point to their own blog, or approach the area with a fair slug
of humility.

That’s my thoughts so far on PR and blogging. No where near as
extreme as Russell Beattie. But no where near as patronising as Steve
Rubel’s response to him either, I hope - which could be the real reason
for Russell’s grumpy response.