Bloggasm

In my admittedly unscientific observations, I have come to the conclusion that most publicists and people who work in PR and marketing are absolutely terrible at their jobs. Many in the PR industry make more than journalists, and yet the stuff they send to journalists to try to promote their clients is some of the laziest bottom-of-the-barrel shit — It doesn’t even begin to entice the writers to pay any attention to them.

How do I know this? Well, my email address is easy to find on this blog, and due to the fact that I’m what would be called a B-list blogger, I get quite a few emails and press releases from publicists. Out of all the emails I’ve received, there is only one instance that I recall actually replying with interest to the person who sent it. And even in that case I took a moment to tell the guy that he should have worded it better because I had almost deleted the email as spam.

To give you an example of what I’m talking about I’m going to have to pick on a publicist, sorry. Here is an email I received recently:

Hello

I’m Jacquinn, publicist at Adams Media; a publishing company in Massachusetts. I was surfing the web for intriguing blogs that review books and came across yours. I am interested in sending you some books to review if time permits, and a copy of our catalog so you can have your pick off our current offerings. What’s the best address to use? Thank you for your time.

Best,

Jacquinn Williams
Publicist
Adams Media

What’s wrong with this email? I’ll tell you what’s wrong in my five simple rules for PR people who contact bloggers:

1. Find out what the blog is actually about: As you can see, Jacquinn was searching out blogs that review books when she came across me. The only problem is that I don’t actually review books on this site. Not that I would be against reviewing a book, but it would have to be one that has something to do with the media or journalism. A quick look at Adams Media’s website shows that most of the books published there don’t fall into this category.

2. Address me by name: This one really gets me, that these people are too lazy to take the five extra seconds to take the message that they obviously copy and pasted to 50+ other bloggers and attach my name to the front of it. It’s not too hard to find, it’s right below my picture on the right and above the email address you just copy and pasted into your inbox.

3. Tie your message to a specific post I’ve written: It’s often not good enough that you’ve researched what kind of content the blog publishes. If you can tie your message to a specific blog post written by the blogger, you greatly increase your chances of being noticed. For instance, if you’re trying to promote a new social networking site, find a post written by the blogger that harshly criticizes Myspace and then explain to him in your message why your website doesn’t have any of the faults he listed.

4. Do not under any circumstances put me onto some mass mailing list: This is pretty much self-explanatory. Not only will this cause me to ignore you, but I’ll also block you as well, which will make things more difficult for you even if you clean up your act.

5. Space out your news announcements/tips: Even if you follow all the above rules, try to space out your news tips to a single person by at least a month. You should have a number of bloggers that you’re targeting. Divide them up into categories and then slowly feed them news on a cycle so they’re not getting overloaded with press releases every time your client farts.

Yes, I know that these rules mean that you’re going to take a lot more time writing to specific bloggers rather than being able to copy and paste press releases to over 100 in the span of an hour. But you know what? Doing things this way means your hit rate — aka, bloggers actually paying attention to you — is going to be much higher.

So how do I know this method works? Because I do my own PR for this blog, and I’m pretty damn successful at it. To give you just one example, I’ll copy and paste an email I sent to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds a few months ago. The email resulted in a link from him and not only thousands of click-throughs from his site, but it also propelled it onto the front page of Fark and dozens of other sites as well.

Hey Glenn,

I know you’re a big science fiction fan, so I thought you might find this list of 50 nerdy pick-up lines amusing:

http://bloggasm.com/50-nerdy-pick-up-lines

Take care and keep writing,
Simon

See how simple that was? Because of that one email, that post has now received over 60,000 pageviews and counting.