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Confirming expectations and common sense

Posted on March 25th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

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APCO Worldwide and the Council of Public Relations Firms just released a study on the similarities and differences on how public relations executives and bloggers view blogger relations. It confirms common sense, but it also shows me that common sense is not always applied.

The first thing that jumps out to me is that 52% of PR execs think that they and/or their firms do a good job reaching out to bloggers, while 65% of blogger felt otherwise. That means that, essentially, two-thirds of bloggers believe that PR efforts are poor.

This is important for what it says and for what it doesn’t say.

First of all, it means to me that we, as an industry are at least partially failing to effectively create best practices. There are probably too many haphazard efforts that are designed for mass exposure - meaning no effective targeting. And pitches may often empty of any relevance or filled with a false sense of camaraderie. And this probably occurs because a firm gets a client and off they go promoting.

In defense of agencies, however, it’s hard to see how it often could be that much different at times. While I agree PR practitioners should familiarize themselves with a blogger’s subject matter and style, it is impossible to do it on such a large scale. There are no Bacon’s or Cision’s media guide to work off. And clients often want results fast.

This is not to excuse the practice. It means that we in the profession must constantly seek to create methodologies that work for both the client and the blogger. I also see a potential business opportunity here for online directories to enhance their listings and perhaps charge a fee for a higher level of service.

Nevertheless, that gap is too large and the 65% of dissatisfied bloggers is abhorrently high. This brings me to a second point because the study points out that 63% of the bloggers surveyed that they get pitched at least once per week, 42% get pitched once per day, and 27% get pitched more than once per day. I talked to Matt Shaw, the Vice President of the Council of Public Relations Firms to clarify who these bloggers are. Essentially, they were approximately 400 “top” bloggers who responded to their survey.

Now we’re talking. Because it’s those A-List bloggers who are key here. Because they have the ability to make or break this whole blogger relations phenomenon. They’re the ones that are going to be getting pitched to more often - often as we see as being more than once a day.

Part of the problem is seen in the further findings by the study. Only 36% of PR execs agreed with the statement that “Bloggers are journalists and should be treated as such”, yet 62% of these execs nevertheless agreed with the statement “PR firms should reach out to bloggers essentially the same way we do to traditional media.”

This shows me two things. One is that the ways we reach out to traditional media are entirely adequate as methods that can be transferred to reaching out to bloggers. And/or it could mean that PR execs have yet to come to terms as to what the hell bloggers really are in the first place.

I suspect it’s both. Often, an honest respectful engagement can win over a reporter as it can a blogger. But sometimes it can’t . Bloggers themselves often don’t have any standards. They got into blogging and had no idea that they would soon get pitched on an almost daily basis. And what at first may have been flattering has now become annoying.