Blogs and Public Relations

Pitching bloggers and journalists directly is often times hit or miss unless you have a long term relationship. Even so, here are some good guidelines for pitching blogs to follow.

There’s a good Media Relations with Bloggers article from Media Metamorphosis that presents some alternative ways of reaching bloggers and journalists. The just of it is, find out what blogs the journalist reads and using a combination of relevant comments and trackbacks, gain visibility and start a conversation.

One interesting tool for discovering what blogs/sites your intended audience reads is Rollyo, a service that allows you to build your own search engine of sites you want to track.

What’s neat about Rollyo is that you can see the list of sites each person has included in their searchrolls. So if a particular journalist or executive at a prospect company has created a searchroll, you can see the list of sites they trust and know which sites to gain visibility on.

Another search tool that’s useful is the Touchgraph Google Browser. This tool is useful for finding related blogs to blogs or sites that you already know about. It literally graphs relationships between sites to reveal sites you may have not found otherwise.

In the spirit of blogging PR, there are two recent blogging/public relations surveys worth mentioning:

One is a survey of public relations firms, Blog Relations PR Survey of 50 PR firms by Blog Relations. The response was nearly split as to the perception of blogs as good or bad. Most had never pitched a blog and almost half feel there are “a good number of influential blogs”.

The second surveys bloggers, Technorati/Edelman Blogger PR Survey which was set up “to better understand how blogging and traditional PR intersect, and what bloggers think about communication from mainstream companies.” according to Niall Kennedy of Technorati.

Blogging is still a new world to most PR firms but more are getting into the game. What they’re learning is that pitching blogs is not the same thing as traditional media. There are no doubt similarities, but many blogs are quick to judge – good or bad, so it’s good advice to be relevant, do your homework and be patient.