Blogger Relations
The “PR people suck” meme of this week – which whacked several PR firms (ours included, dammit) - got me thinking.
I’ve said before that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” … The public outing of bad PR practices that seems to occur with increasing frequency will, eventually, cow the best among us into doing an ever-better job.
I say “the best among us” because the good agencies do care about doing a good job. The bad agencies don’t care and won’t change. They will continue, as all spammers do, to play the odds via lots & lots of bad pitches. (“Dear Site Owner…” Ugh!!)
However, despite the good agencies’ best intentions and whole-hearted, in-depth training efforts, mistakes will continue to happen.
The field is filled with young, eager, aggressive people who move too fast sometimes. They can be trained for weeks on end, but they’ll still make mistakes. As all parents know, sometimes the only way a kid learns is by falling flat on their face. It’s too bad that these mistakes increasingly lead to public humiliation and mortally-wounded career prospects.
But, we can guide our industry. Just as it’s easy to skim a list of bad PR pitches from any reporter’s email log and append them to an angry blog post, it’s now also easier than ever for PR pros to share best practices. Rather than bemoan our fate, our industry is becoming increasingly proactive (p.s., each link in this paragraph is well worth your time).
If you’re like me, though, you can read (and even bookmark) some good advice you see online, but when you’re rushing to finish an assignment, it’s tough to take the time to dig up those helpful tips online.
So here’s one small contribution (pdf): it’s a list of “Blogger Relations” tips, published in a handy bookmark size intended for hardcopy printing.
Print it; grab a pair of scissors; cut along the dotted lines and voila – you’ve got a handy-dandy bookmark on Blogger Relations. Post it to a cube wall, laminate it into an actual bookmark, etc. In fact, here at SHIFT we’re going to post them at every workstation, to supplement the lessons that our staffers learn in their on-going training sessions.
As per usual, it’s free, no copyright restrictions, etc. Slice off our logo, or superimpose your own on top of ours. Don’t care. If the distribution of our Blogger Relations Bookmark results in just one young PR pro not humiliating themselves, that’s all the payment we’d need. Hope you find it useful.
Note: these are just quick tips… you can’t fit a training manual on a bookmark! Still, following these simple guidelines could ward off the most egregious Blogger Relations errors.
Continue reading here: Susan G. Komen Pr Disaster: Lessons Learned
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