Last week, we wrote about a tiff over PR practices between bloggers Russell Beattie and Steve Rubel, who represent different ends of the argument.
Russell takes the line "all PR people are morons" and wants to be left
alone by the whole industry. Steve, a PR man himself and a Blog
Relations expert to boot, welcomes all approaches apparently, as he likes
to sift through everything to find the odd nugget.
With this range of opinion, some PR people
are recommending that the whole blogging scene is avoided altogether,
which seems a shame for both sides, potentially. If PR people can feed
us stories our readers might find interesting, that would be a good
thing for everyone, surely?
So we’ve come up with a solution, that we hope will be adopted by all
our blogging friends and noted by the PR industry as a whole.
We’ve designed a choice of three simple logos for bloggers to display
on their blogs, which spell out, at a glance, what they’d like PR
people to do:
is for bloggers who, like Russell Beattie, want to be left alone by the
entire industry. Don’t approach these people under any circumstances.
You’ll only have yourself to blame if they flame you or arrange to
publicly saut√© you or your client’s products.
Do NOT approach!
is for bloggers to display if they don’t care who approaches them with
what. But let’s be a little reasonable, you PR people. Just because
they say they’re happy to be approached, doesn’t mean that you can’t
try to be targeted in your pitches. Someone writing about technology,
for instance, isn’t going to be interested in cat food or knitting. So
for the sake of your own credibility, try to play the game, OK?
is the middle ground, which will probably be most of us, to be honest.
This will allow PR people to click on the logo to see what the
blogger’s policy towards PR pitches is, before approaching them.
MobHappy’s policy, for instance is:
With some rather large caveats, we welcome pitches from PR people or
anyone wanting to promote their website, product or service.
Our caveats are:
1. Please make sure that the information is about mobile technology, or
at a stretch, technology generally. Read the blog – is there a good chance
we might publish it?
2. If you keep sending us rubbish, we won’t read your pitches any more.
3. Keep it brief please, in the first instance. We can always ask for more info.
4. Don’t use the comments section on our blogs to blatantly promote
your or your client’s products. It REALLY pisses us off. You have been
warned.
<Policy ends>
We hope you like this approach and if you’re a blogger, please feel
free to download one of the logos for your own site.
We’d also love to
hear what everyone thinks about the idea, so leave a comment or tell us
if it makes any difference.
Carlo adds: I just want to reiterate the second part of Russell’s fist caveat: read this blog before you pitch. It wouldn’t hurt to try and build some sort of relationship with us, either via reading and commenting or privately. And also please keep in mind that if the only reason you can come up with why something is interesting is because you’re promoting it, it’s safe to say that almost without exception, we won’t be interested.
—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
