How to pitch bloggers

Published on 7/6/2005 in Mouthing Off. Comments

Anil Dash has some good advice for PR folks who want his attention.

Most of this stuff doesn’t surprise me anymore. I’ve been in enough agencies and seen enough awful pitches to know that the other side must cringe when they get them. But being deliberately antagonistic is another thing. To wit,

Don’t deliberately antagonize me. This means: Word documents, PDFs, or pretty much any attachment at all. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any blogger who’ll read these things, let alone one who actually wants them. Don’t flame me for not linking to or mentioning your product. (This has happened.) Don’t throw in an offensive joke in your pitch email so that you’ll seem “cool”. (This has also happened.) And don’t implicitly insult my readers or audience by suggesting that I write something that would mislead them. (Sadly, this has happened, too.)

Folks, this can’t be said or repeated enough times … STOP SENDING ATTACHMENTS IN YOUR EMAILS TO REPORTERS!!!

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  • Oh, don't get me wrong Anil. I do read your blog, but I think of you as Anil Dash, Six Apart mastro. Blame the mainstream media for that one. If I had something appropriate that I thought you would be interested in, of course I would shoot it off to you. But, if it was appropriate.

    And, well, time is money, so those few minutes are costing you.]

    Nice Goatsie tshirt in the NYT, btw.
  • I think (and of course I'm biased) that my blog is many things, in addition to being a "corporate blog". I do talk about Six Apart and our products and services sometimes, but it's actually pretty rare. I'm much more likely to talk about broader topics than just what we do as a company, and so I think it's pretty appropriate to pitch, since I am primarily a personal/enthusiast blogger.

    It's interesting, though, that perceptions of a single blog can vary so much. Makes those database classifications seem even more crude than they are.

    And yeah, these are general PR issues, but writers in traditional media aren't going to burn column inches on outing bad PR people, but with blogs, it doesn't cost me anything but a few minutes of time to do so. That means there's going to be a lot more blowback than the worst case in, say, print media, which is just that your client's product gets ignored.
  • You're right. it is a PR issue. These are the same complaints we've heard from reporters and editors for years. Sad how it hasn't changed - in fact with the internet and more targets and tools available to PRbots, it's gotten worse.
  • I guess I'm naive, but why would you send a pitch to Dash? Yes, his blog covers a wide range of topics, but at the end of the day it's also a corporate blog.

    And, it's not a blogger / PR issue, but a PR issue. Every one of his complaints is something we've heard from reporters, and more indicative of no oversight of junior staff, or just crappy senior staff.
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