Jed Hallam

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Blogger outreach: why you should do it

Public Relations / Social Media

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February 9, 2010 View Comments

Kerry Gaffney and Darika Aherns, I bloody love them both. They both spit truth and fire and always manage to post my brain thoughts on their blogs. Until now.

Darika and Kerry both recently posted about blogger outreach, they both wrote how, due to small campaign scales, we should look at client education and turn down short term work or shift focus from influential bloggers to mainstream bloggers and save ourselves time and effort – after all, we don’t have enough budget to maintain permanent blogger relations, do we?

Darika wrote;

It’s not possible to build trusted relations and have brand conversations in the short-term. Three months, the traditional quarterly budget or common campaign cycle, is not long enough.

Yes. Yes we do, that’s what we’re paid to do, that’s why we’re specialists and expert relationship builders.

Blogger relations, much like media relations isn’t just for Christmas, or Spring, or Summer. The people that you meet today don’t have a shelf life, and the strongest relationships are the ones that develop over a long period of time. Making friends isn’t a start / stop process.

Kerry wrote;

Niche bloggers might well not have the same range of places to get info and may well also feel a bit used and abused after the short campaign finishes. Which made me think that perhaps we shouldn’t look to engage bloggers at all on a proactive basis.

Kerry’s point about niche blogs really falls on my deaf ears; niche bloggers don’t feed from the mainstream, it’s completely the other way around. Run a network analysis tool (like ours ;-) ) through virtually any network and you’ll find that the influential blogs are the niche ones – watch how the news spreads through a network and 9 times out of 10 you’ll find it starts at a niche blog. So no, you can’t ignore them and just go for the big boys.

Kerry wrote;

I think basically I’m advocating a hybrid approach between traditional media relations and a self-service canteen here, which would lead to bloggers being self-selecting about working with PRs rather than being bombarded with love and then dropped when the next campaign starts.

Some of this I believe in, you can’t just drop a blogger once the campaign is finished, you need to nurture that relationship – most clients buy agencies for two reasons; experience and expertise – that expertise is what you know and who you know. WHO YOU KNOW.

As Darika says;

I personally turn down a lot of short-term project work these days because I think it’s not possible to achieve much beyond securing a few blog posts. I also don’t like hearing from bloggers and community contacts that they weren’t looked after beyond the life-cycle of a specific campaign – I’m not in this industry for the short-term.

Phew.

Kerry’s post also bought up another issue I’ve been wanting to raise; An inconvenient PR truth (I’m now back to agreeing with Kerry!), and Adam Parker (again, someone that I have the upmost respect for). The inconvenient truth is a very noble concept, it looks to fix our industry, but hey, let’s be frank, the only people that will read that already probably follow the Bill of Rights – they’re savvy PR people, that’s how they found it. They don’t work at a two man agency in Swinbourne that peppers national press with  lawnmower spares news releases.

# This post has been updated in a few ways, quotes have now been attributed, a quote from Darika has been added and a sentence has been added that distinguishes two points (second paragraph, first sentence).

  • Great info... simple and useful. I also love the picture!
  • The conversation seems to have moved on a lot below, but if I can quickly respond to the original post. What this comes down to is a question of value. Blogger outreach at its optimum should be about passionate people engaging with others who share their passion. The problem arises when you have professionals engaged in blogger relations around a topic they have little knowledge about or interest in. Then the relationship will always be a marriage of convenience, no matter how many sweet nothings they utter.
  • Kerrymg
    I think this is a topic that bears a bit more scrutiny, so ever one for crowdsourcing opinion I've posted a poll on my blog to guage the general feeling - it can be found here --->http://ow.ly/15Okl
  • DarikaAhrens
    Ok so finally having a chance to respond. Jed, in a brief exchange I've mentioned how unhappy I was to have my comments taken so out of context. Here's my issues:
    - I didn't write a post about blogger relations, I wrote about social media campaigns vs long term strategy
    - I don't think we should only focus on "mainstream" bloggers (not even sure what that means)
    - You missed my point that 3 months isn't an ideal time period for a bit of niche outreach for a one-off campaign (and client), not that PR professionals shouldn't maintain relations with bloggers

    My intention this week was to spark off some blog posts on Best Practice as an antidote to the continual PR bashing which goes on around our work. I'm happy to take a bit of bashing over my opinions, as long as they are actually opinions I hold not ones which have been mistakenly attributed to me.
  • Hi Jed

    First up thanks for the “noble” review re: the campaign. Before I cover my points re: blogger relations, on your point about the “need” for standards, or lack of – and isn't this conversation all about standards? - can I just leave you to chew over the following and get back to me with your thoughts.

    In the industry I come from (accountancy) being a *qualified* professional (chartered in my case) is the default position for the vast majority. But despite three years of intensive training and rigorous examinations, never mind subsequent CPD requirements, we still have very, very extensive, detailed and strict guidelines. Is this because we have no idea what professional accounting practice and advice is like? No. It is so there is absolute clarity on what is required to perform professionally and so that this is a shared and agreed upon.

    These standards are then required of the hundreds of thousands of people who are part of that profession from the largest such as PricewaterhouseCoopers (my old employer) down to the one person practice. At the same time this is an industry that generally makes 30-40% profit margins. Is that a coincidence? Or does it reflect an industry that as a whole takes quality *extremely* seriously, so that the baseline is set at a high level and then competes, ironically, on particular relevance to their clients rather than competence?

    And yet we are only bean counters, we don't look after something as valuable as reputation :-)

    On the issue of blogger outreach as James says we are collectively the converted on whether, with the required investment in the relationship, there is huge potential value in engaging with niche bloggers. At RealWire we have asked ourselves should we even try and distribute to bloggers though because of the investment/relationship question? Our view is that since we only make a relatively limited investment in the relationship i.e. we aren’t part of their communities, we better make sure at the very least we are trying our best to be respectful and relevant - or we shouldn’t bother. I guarantee we don't achieve this 100 per cent, but we keep investing in trying to find ways to.

    The keyword here is investment. I think Kerry’s point that picking people up and putting them down is very true and that it is better to do nothing than to drop standards. But this is because of the client’s level of investment and its short termist nature. Therefore as Ian says as professionals we need to focus on educating and more importantly, challenging, on the benefits of long term engagement and the investment this requires. This way standards aren't compromised and the benefits of engagement can be realised.

    Thanks again
    Adam
  • Maybe because I'm sometimes pitched as a blogger and sometimes (probably mistakenly) as a real journalist, I feel a tiny-bit qualified to respond.

    Blogger outreach as practised by anyone who contacts me as a blogger (as opposed to a journo who blogs) is universally piss-poor. "Dear blogger", "Dear Ian + boilerplate", "Dear Twopointouch". Just fuck off. You're wasting everyone's time - except, actually, all you did was click the 'merge' button, so it's only my time.

    I know, at the same time, that you guys aren't getting paid nearly the same amount to engage social media as you are to engage with 'proper' press. I would probably take the same shortcuts under the circumstances.

    So, it needs to get pushed back a level. Social media is currently sold as an addition, and the social media folk are a burden on the account's cost-centre. And it's really expensive to keep a watch and some interaction with the social scene. It's 24/7/365. So it's fucked in any conventional agency.

    Why do you [I don't mean you, Jed] do that and thus get yourselves into the sort of pickles that you do - you're compelled to short-change everyone? Grow some frickin balls.
  • Hey Vikki,

    My bad on the quotes - I was a bit bleary eyed last night while I was typing this up. I also think that there's a good chance I've wrongly attributed quotes (I think Darika's posting soon to correct me).

    I've updated now though, hope that clears things up for everyone!
  • Anyone would think that this is brand new information; 'being a human being' and all that. Really, ground-breaking stuff.
    ;)
  • vchowney
    I'm not even sure who I'm supposed to be agreeing with, it's really difficult to tell which quote comes from where...

    However, I'm pretty saddened to hear the concept of a short-term relationship being thrown around here. Thinking in terms of campaigns is one of the first things I tell people asking me how to work with bloggers NOT to do. Why on earth would you tell a blogger that you'd love to get them involved with your client, but only for the next quarter, because you 'can't offer them long-term commitment'?!

    If someone said that to me, I'd think that was a) a very strange thing to say and b) that this probably means I'm only going to be of value for a little while. If you entered into a friendship with someone, and they said that, you just wouldn't even bother pursuing it. In fact, you'd think that they were being pretty arrogant about their own importance. Why is it any different?

    Maintaining a long-term relationship doesn't actually have to be resource heavy. It might just mean that I'd like to come back to you for a comment in six months time, or that you've waved at me at an event. Simple as that.
  • DarikaAhrens
    Vikki - completely. I feel some quotes of mine have been taken and applied to a whole new context (if you read my initial post, which wasn't about blogger relations BTW, it echoes what you're saying)
    In fact, there's so much I want to address in this post Jed knows I'm taking the time to come back later and respond properly.
  • Kerrymg
    Sorry - with the long term comittment comment I was being unneccesarily flip. I also think I owe Darika an apology, it was me that brought up the idea of not doing proactive blogger relations, which was an idea sparked from her post about not treating social media as a series of short campaigns but as a long term thing. I completely agree with her but have seen/heard/been asked to recommend short term engagement strategies to do exactly that. This is because social media is still thought of by some as a tactical bolt on and not a strategic or intrinsic part of any comms campaign.

    My original post was aimed at stirring up some discussion, prolly should've actually flagged that in the post itself. I should also have made it clearer that perhaps we should push back on clients or call out brands who do take a short term view and suggest a more reactive approach - again make it easy for assessts to be found or contact to be made.

    Ian - am intrigued about your statement around PRs not getting paid as much to do the social media schizzle as they do 'proper' press as that's definitely not something I've come across.
  • Kerrymg
    A fine rebuttal there Mr Hallam but there are a couple of points I'd like to clarify.

    I agree with you, and disagree with Darika, that there is time to build relationships with bloggers over a three month period. However I'm not sure we should being doing that if we know that it's going to be it and that after three months they'll dropped like a stone as we move on to the next campaign dictated target audience. That said perhaps we should be upfront, tell the bloggers invovled that we can't offer them a long-term commitment right now.

    As for the niche feeding the mainstream, both media and bloggers. You are right, again, yes they do but not exclusively and not every niche blogger has influence. Though they potentially have great influence if not popularity which makes it even more important that we don't piss them off.

    Finally remember that this is a discussion based on whether you can/should engage bloggers for a short term campaign. If you are working on a long term strategy/plan with a client then building long term relationships with the key influencers, both on and offline, is vital. As Darika pointed out in here post, if you're in-house then what the hell are you waiting for.
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