Last week I told you how not to pitch a blogger in your PR outreach, so it raises the pregnant question of what exactly should you do?
For about five years now we’ve seen an extraordinary number of clients and potential clients who have frankly been afraid of blogger outreach because of the poor practices of companies and brands that have stumbled in their attempts to engage the blogosphere. So today I wanted to walk through our process to show you how it’s done. Just how do you pitch a blogger?
First off, we see if we already know anyone. We know folks at the top tech blogs, so we give them first bite. By the time that shakes out, we’ll have a couple-few-thousand blogs to QA and sort out. While we’re seeing how the A-listers pan out, we develop a message model that is inclusive enough to not alienate any single blogger but specific enough that each blogger is completely clear as to who our client is and what we want from them (a post, a tweet, an embedded video, a review, etc).
Then, we send out the first outreach and send four or five online analysts to man the inbox so that potentially a thousand replies can be triaged and responded to, like in a hospital emergency room. Who is spitting mad? Who needs more information? Who needs a little prodding or convincing?
Time should be a primary consideration
Time is of the essence. More conversions have been made with charming, patient, friendly and quick emails than have ever been made through just the pitch. Why is time ticking? If someone is a little pissed when they get the email and hit reply, they’ll be a lot more pissed and maybe drop an unhappy tweet if they’re ignored for a few hours. If they’re ignored for a day, they will amplify their displeasure by posting it onto their blog, effectively making it very sure they’re heard.
It has less to do with bloggers being vindictive or making their fame on your client’s good name but has way more to do with stepping up displeasure. “I want to be heard, I need to be heard, I have a grievance, and I will be heard no matter what.” To be honest with you, that never happens to us any more because we’re endlessly kind, patient, giving, indulgent, compliant, respectful and super-quick.
Super-quick is the biggest, most important thing. Latency is always punished. And have a system, because it is inexcusable to allow any of these thousands of “nobody” bloggers to ever get less than exquisite service. Don’t play favorites. Triaging the responses has nothing to do with the bank balance or Rolodex or fame or celebrity or reach of the blogger. It has to do with whether a blogger is
- willing to post gladly
- willing to post but needs more information
- willing to post but leery of legitimacy
- maybe willing to post but generally conflicted or confused
- how did you find my blog and get my email?
- unwilling to post but maybe willing to tweet
- unwilling to post
- unwilling to post and please remove my name
- who the hell are you and how did you get my email address or find my blog
- wrong topic, I don’t care about this
- you’ve insulted me and I will seek vengeance
Honestly, even #11 is fine as long as you don’t meet that blogger with the same anger and menace as is being shared. Remember our mantra: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Walking into a drama that’s in progress
I always like to say, when I am speaking at conferences and on panels, that my online team never knows what they’re walking into but that responses like rage and frustration are almost never the direct result of our simple, minimal, friendly email pitch. In a majority of the cases, we’re walking into a drama that is already in progress. Sort of like when a beat cop responds to a domestic 911 call.
Cops hate responding to a domestic disturbance because nobody’s more likely to shoot someone than when they feel like their life is imploding and the only thing that can make someone that crazy is love. Too many cops have been shot as the direct result of unknowingly stepping into someone else’s personal or collective hell. So my team is trained to at least emulate endless patience, love, acceptance and generosity, though my colleague Leslie Quiros tells me that she really sometimes needs to stop, think and breathe, before responding online sometimes. God bless her.
Even more, after we collect and log all of these positive, negative and neutral responses, we wait a week and do it all again, but reaching out only to the bloggers who have not responded at all. While a few of these folks might be ignoring us by not responding, we have concluded that the vast majority of folks who don’t reply during the first outreach just don’t see it or missed it or, more likely, either intend to later but forget or simply don’t know who we are at first and just assume the pitch isn’t for real.
When we reach out one week later and then again a week after that, they’ve seen the email a couple of times and give it a try and are pleased to see that it’s authentic and that there are friendly online analysts more than happy to be friendly and kind at the other end.
It’s not about fooling the bloggers, it’s about authenticity
People are funny and I quite love my species — and I think that attitude is our secret AH sauce: We don’t consider the people we pitch to be the enemy that must be fooled into helping our clients. Quite the opposite. I started my company because I believe that there are lots and lots of vocal proponents on any topic under the sun who just have not been activated yet. Who don’t realize that their voice is important and that agencies like mine and clients like mine find that their choice to create their publishing empire, no matter how modest though it may be, is very exciting, very useful, and very cool to us and to our clients, to be sure!
And, unlike the simulated world of the elaborately constructed inbound link sellosphere, shilloshere, linkosphere, or whatever it is, blogger outreach is authentic. When we send out two-thousand emails pitched to two-thousand bloggers, the 400 bloggers who post over the course of a month don’t have to. We don’t pay them, we don’t trade horses, and we don’t make empty promises.
Not all 2,000 post, only the 400 for whom the message resonates. It is earned media. It is real, even if the blogger simply embeds a video or quotes the pitch email verbatim or copy-and-pastes the social media news release full-text, it’s up to each blogger. No matter what they say, no matter how editorialized, or matter how off message their interpretation may well be (and when it is, it is generally our fault for not being clear enough). It is a thing of beauty and it is ceaselessly amazing that folks online are so endlessly generous and active.
But it all starts with the right attitude–putting the blogger first is the secret of how to pitch a blogger.
For about five years now we’ve seen an extraordinary number of clients and potential clients who have frankly been afraid of blogger outreach because of the poor practices of companies and brands that have stumbled in their attempts to engage the blogosphere. So today I wanted to walk through our process to show you how it’s done. Just how do you pitch a blogger?