The Blog Medic

Day to day, I wear many hats. On one hand, I’m a blogger, I need news and stories to feed my writing, occasionally receiving these useful tidbits from PR and marketing people in the industries I cover, most of the time sourcing them from my RSS feeds. On the other hand, I find myself in the position of - or working closely with - the people who need to send out those press releases to bloggers.

It’s a fascinating, if sometimes morally uncomfortable, place to be. Over the years, I’ve built up a list of the best and the worst ways I, or other bloggers around me, have been accosted by PR people.

1. Untargeted email: This one’s pretty simple. You send me a press release about Windows Vista when I’m obviously an Apple fangirl since I was a child, you invite me to try your new product when it’s only available to US residents, you tell me to listen to this new awesome tween band when I’m as far from a tweenie bopper as it gets. Epic fail!
2. Fake personal email or friendliness: Don’t pretend to be my best mate in a cold email or cold call. I’d rather have an impersonal email than to be sung the same canned song as everyone else.
3. Large attachments: This isn’t specific to PR, but when I receive a handful of releases with videos attached on the same day, it’s a real pain. Suggesting that I should post your video online without directing me to a YouTube account where YOU have already done the hard work of uploading and tagging it shows that you haven’t got a clue. You’re fired!
4. Secretive/partial release of information: So you’re looking for a hook, something to grab me and keep me at your mercy, waiting for baited breath for your next announcement. But unless you provide enough info to allow me to write confidently about the product, it’s a waste of my time.
5. The carbon copy: Blind carbon copying someone is the cheapest way and laziest way to broadcast to a number of people, but unless they’ve specifically signed up to a mailing list, this is an unacceptable way to introduce yourself to a group of bloggers. Worst yet is putting multiple recipients in the “To:” field, making their addresses public to others.
6. The boaster: This is often down to the client rather than the PR agency, but it’s a pet peeve nonetheless. Companies that claim to be “the best”, “the first” and “the biggest” grate our collective nerves something nasty. Let us decide if you’re great or not.
7. Getting our names wrong: It’s Vero. Not Vergo, not Vera, not Verona. And yes, Pepperrell is a triple double consonant name. Yes, it’s hard work for me too, but it is written on my blog, you could even copy/paste it. Thanks. Now get it right.
8. Lack of responsiveness: You’re hoping I’ll post as promptly as possible about your product, so be responsive if I have questions. You don’t want me to post wrong information, neither do I, since we’ll both look like numpties. Quicksticks!
9. Failing to provide plenty of digital assets: Colourful screenshots, high quality logos and readily available video will make my life so much easier, and could make the difference between posting now and putting it in the “to write later” inbox (known as the press release graveyard).
10. Calling it an exclusive when it’s obviously been around more than Paris Hilton’s first video: It’s great to flatter our ego every so often, but don’t pretend you lurve us so much as to give an exclusive, then let it become obvious you’ve been saying it to two dozen other bloggers.

Thanks to the many bloggers who suggested items for this list, and here’s to hoping that marketing and public relations managers hear us loud and clear. What are your pet peeves coming from those who want you to write about them?

This post was inspired by Rohit Bhargava’s panel during SXSW called “Core Conversations: 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off A Blogger”, which I unfortunately missed but heard much about afterwards.

[Update: Adam Ostrow has also posted on 12 Things Not to do when Pitching to Mashable. There you go, PR people, don’t say we didn’t warn you!]

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Whether it’s your own business endeavour or you’re writing for a corporate blog, you’ll want to track who’s talking about you and what they’re saying. Traditionally, PR agencies would put together daily all the press cuttings for a company and send them through.

When the boss said “let’s launch a blog”, he might not have allocated the budget to do this large-scale tracking, but will expect you to circulate some metrics and reports on the buzz you’re creating. Thankfully, the Internet is full of useful and free resources.

Find the buzz

What are people saying? What low-effort, automated ways are there to track the buzz? Keeping in mind the limited amount of time you’ll want to dedicate to analysis (you want to spend your time writing, don’t you?), there are great ways to automate or simplify the research.

• Google Alerts: Setup Google Alerts with your company name, your competitors’ names and some industry keywords. You’ll get reporting from news, blogs, videos and pretty much everything Google indexes. Get it as an email or RSS feed* on a daily basis.
• Twitter tracking: If your users are likely to be active on Twitter, you might want to track a few keywords relating to your brand.
• Yahoo Answers: Do a first search for your company name (For example, Priceline) and click the orange RSS icon in the address bar to start tracking it. This feed will bring up any mention of your search term - it may also pick up some irrelevant flotsam along the way if your brand name is something too common.
• Google Analytics: I think you should be using Google Analytics for a number of reasons (which I’ll reserve for a later post, alongside a review of multiple other free stats packages), but amongst them lies a priceless tool - Referring sources. Find out who is linking to you and how much traffic they’re sending you. It’s often a good way to quantify how much visibility the author of the praising or criticising article gets.
• Del.icio.us bookmarking: Visit Del.icio.us and search for related keywords. Look at which posts have been most bookmarked by readers, it may hint at what kind of content they find most useful.

[* Not clear on what an RSS feed is? No shame in asking! Back in Skinny Jeans has one of my favourite simple explanations of all times.]

Share the buzz

Now that you’ve found out what’s going on, there are ways to share the information (aside from the dreaded weekly spreadsheet) which your colleagues may find refreshing.

• Del.icio.us (yes, again!): Create an account and aggregate your findings by bookmarking their URLs (The Firefox toolbar plugin makes it so easy) and sharing either all the bookmarks, or simply those tagged with a specific word. For example, if I worked for Campaign Monitor, I could share http://del.icio.us/thatcanadiangirl/campaignmonitor with the team, having tagged all relevant news with “campaignmonitor”. [Bonus points: Integrate the feed to your blog as Twitter have done on theirs to share the buzz with your readers.]
• Google Reader: If your colleagues are somewhat technically inclined, they may be using RSS readers already. If that’s the case, exploit the “Shared items” feeds in Google Reader to instantly distribute useful links. Danny Sullivan has a great explanation of Google’s “Shared items” feature and how to use it.
• Twitterfeed: Want to communicate your findings with your Twitter followers as well? Plug the RSS feed of your choice into Twitter with Twitterfeed. A word of warning, be sure to balance it out with non-automated genuine conversation or you’ll annoy your readership.
• Internal wiki: I’m personally not a big fan of wikis because they take active attention to remain up to date, but if multiple people are likely to report on links they found, it can be a good solution, enabling anyone in the team to modify a given page where all useful links are saved. Wikimedia is an example of a self-hosted wiki you could use.
• Google Docs: I hear you say “enough with the Google love already!” but just one more. Google Documents, provided your colleagues also have a Google account, also allows multiple users to update and edit the same document, whether it’s a text file, spreadsheet or slide presentation.

All of the above are free tools, which should help when you’re working on a tiny or non-existing budget but need to quantify and qualify the buzz to support your reporting to your boss and your colleagues.