Because the Medium is the Message

The following list is adapted from an article written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, that I have edited a little bit — well, I just did a journalist/blogger find/replace with a few changes to make it more apropos:

1. You don’t respect their time – Bloggers have this thing called a real life, a family, and a full-time job. And guess what? Those responsibilities aren’t flexible, and they certainly aren’t going to get met if you try to talk their ear off on the phone or via a long-winded pitch. When messaging bloggers, get to the point, and if they tell you now isn’t a good time, be respectful of that and try to schedule another time for your chat. However, if you don’t have them in 5-minutes, you’ll probably never have them.

2. You send poorly written, spammy press releases – If you had to guess, how many press releases do you think are sent out each day that are actually well written and useful? I suspect it’s probably less than 10%. Don’t believe me? Just go read any online news wire. Yikes! (Chris: I didn’t change a word on this one, bloggers are exactly the same in this regard)

3. You’re difficult to contact – Your company’s PR contact needs to be easy to contact. Contact info should always be on every social media news release you send out, and it should also be somewhere on your website. And when the blogger actually tries to get in touch with the PR guy, he should be able to do so easily.

4. You send stories completely irrelevant to what they cover – Don’t just send out your social media news release to every blogger on your email list. That’s an easy way to make a lot of bloggers hate you. You need to have your email list segmented according to the type of stories the bloggers cover. This helps you make more targeted pitches so you can get the best results.

5. You don’t know when to take ‘no’ for an answer–There’s something to be said for perseverance, but there’s also something bad to be said for people who don’t know when no means no. (Chris: many bloggers just get quiet instead of saying no.  But you can never tell. We reach out three times in every blogger outreach — each time only to the people who never reply. When we tried a 4th outreach, people definitely tell us no, but in a terribly negative way. Be sure to outreach several times but don’t push until you get a NO! because then it is too late and you have surely hurt your reputation and have probably burnt a bridge.)

Otherwise it is the same except, as I comment below, bloggers feel this ten-times more intensely and are ten-times more likely to show their unhappiness and frustration in the form of a unflattering blog post, wall post, or tweet.

I was reading through my Google Reader‘s interpretation of the AdAge Power 150 OPML file and came upon eReleases’ article 10 Things Journalists and PRs Hate About Each Other and realized that it is exactly what we at Abraham Harrison have found that bloggers hate about PR but to the 10th or 100th power, primarily because bloggers are not paid to dance well with public relations and are generally not well-versed in the world of news releases, press releases, and PR pitches.

Via Marketing Conversation.