Blogger Outreach: Gemma Cartwright
Don’t be afraid…
Gemma Cartwright started blogging when she was in 16. She joined Shiny Media [R.I.P.] in 2004 to launch their first fashion site Shoewawa.com, going on to become Group Editor of the Shiny fashion network. She’s written about celebrities for The Nod, happy homelife at Domestic Sluttery, geek chic for Dork Adore, and a host of on- and off-line media.
Last year she founded Big Girls Browse, a site aimed at anyone who finds it hard to shop to suite their shape, and has already attracted interest from most of the High St brands including a guest spot editing the Evans blog.
Gemma Cartwright
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes.
2. Should they?
Absolutely. I really don’t mind receiving press releases, email pitches, celeb style IDs, event invitations…anything really. I’m not bothered by a bulging inbox, I can easily delete the stuff I don’t need. That said, I do get a lot of badly-targeted stuff from PRs in the US and my requests to be removed from their lists go unnoticed. If I went to all the events in NY that I’m invited to, I’d have an astounding amount of airmiles!
Blogger Outreach: Amber McNaught
How wrong can PRs get it?
Aside from battling issues of gingerism and the fact people frequently steal her image to use as their own profile pic, she deals with a lot of crazy PR. She spills all below (names changed to protect the guilty)
Amber McNaught
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes! Sometimes dozens and dozens per day (or hour…)
2. Should they?
Yes, absolutely: I’m always happy to hear about anything that might potentially be of interest to my readers, as long as it’s relevant to my sites.
Blogger Outreach: Katherine Hannaford
Not all bloggers hate PRs, right?
Katherine Hannaford is the UK Contributing Editor of Gizmodo. Having cut her teeth as Editor of Tech Digest she then went on to work as News Editor at T3.com before landing a job with one of the world’s leading technology sites. Consequently Kat has experienced many a Tech PR’s first fumblings in outreach – is she a blogger? journalist? professional writer?
Over the years Kat and I have debated and taken different sides over PR/Blogger frictions. She’s recently emerged though as a vocal supporter that the Twitter name-and-shame culture is tired & unbalanced.
Katherine Hannaford
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes, either by email, phone, or snail-mail.
2. Should they?
I’d rather receive all press releases, however irrelevant they may be, rather than receive less and run the risk of missing out on a story. It takes a millisecond to delete a release, but admittedly I do get frustrated with some agencies who just spam me several times a week with clients’ releases that we’d never even dream of writing up. I do wish they’d bother checking our site for the type of content we cover.
Blogger Outreach: Paul Armstrong
Do any PRs really get this blogger outreach stuff?
P
aul Armstrong is… a PR! Now you’ve recovered from the shock here’s his Blogger chops: He was recently nominated as one of the Top 10 most influential people in the digital industry by PR Week (meaning he gets put on loads of “influencer” lists), and has written for Businessweek, Penthouse [Paul, WTF???], Saturday Night Magazine, BPM, Celebuzz, Lost In A Supermarket and Instinct. He currently writes for Wired UK, Le Branche and PR Week and is the guy behind the crazy successful @mediaisdying Twitter account.
Even though Paul is the Digital Director at Kindred he still receives some appalling “blogger outreach”. I asked him to share his thoughts.
Paul Armstrong
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes
2. Should they?
Sure – I don’t say I’ll get back to them or rely on them so I think all’s fair! Looking for betas, new features, the usual stuff – if for mag stuff – high end design, lux, tech/gadgets.
Blogger Outreach: Sian Meades
Why are we still talking about Blogger Outreach?
Yep, this topic is completely over discussed in online PR circles but we, as an industry, are still doing a horrific job at maintaining any sort of good relations with those who write online.
Nothing illustrated this more to me than seeing even Gary Andrews driven to despair last month [PR's Own Goal]. But when I talk to many PRs they simply just don’t believe how badly and how frequently bloggers are being contacted – making us all, quite frankly, look like numpties.
The #fixPR series tries to give the good with the bad, the fix with the gripe, and I’ve come up with a novel way of doing this. I’ve asked some of my favourite bloggers, in their own words, to tell you about blogger outreach from a blogger’s point of view. This will be a series over the next couple of weeks and they all make FASCINATING reading.
First up is…
Sian Meades
Sian Meades is the founder and editor of interiors and lifestyle website Domestic Sluttery and the new fashion blog A Change of A Dress. Not just content with owning the prettiest corner of the web she also writes for Europe a la Carte, Venere.com and Lastminute.com and has previously written for AOL’s personal finance site Wallet Pop.
As you can imagine the sheer number and range of site Sian’s involved with make for quite the Inbox. Over to Sian.
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes, I probably get about 30-50 emails a day from PRs.
2. Should they?
Yep, we welcome the contact and need to know about new (relevant) products and Cool Things. Sometimes it’s mass mailouts (often skimmed through) other times it’s something targeted. I’m not fussed about either, but I’m more likely to pay attention to the latter.
Social Media: Advice to all PR agencies
we can haz comms profeshionils? kthx
Since I started #fixPR back in January I’ve had a lot of feedback on some of the tips I provided but I’ve also been hearing a similar theme in response
“We know we should but…”
I hate to get all Tony Robbins but… knowing and doing are completely different things. How do you help your agency get to grips with social media? Make it compulsory.
I used to be all soft & fluffy on this issue (honest) but it’s 2010 and I’m still seeing PRs uncomfortable with the word RSS. The only thing for it is a shift in agency culture.
Switch the daily ritual of reading the papers to reading online feeds and social bookmarking, create a simple social media policy and insist people use services like Twitter. Make it happen.
You might run into some resistance so I’ve scripted some handy responses:
Excuse 1: “We don’t have time on top of everything else”
Internal Response: FFS. You’ll have all the time in the world in 2 years time when we’ve lost all our clients and are sat round here twiddling our thumbs. Would that be a more convenient time for you?
Actual Response: “Sure, but there’s actually some real time-saving benefits to getting social. For instance pulling in all our mainstream media into RSS readers cuts down on reading time, the team can collaborate more effectively on finding & sharing stories, we can even reduce our heaving Inboxes by using social bookmarking instead of sending links round the company on email.”
Excuse 2: “My client doesn’t want social media.”
Internal Response: Are you freakin’ kidding me? Aren’t you a media consultant? You should be helping them understand where it’s relevant to them and what’s worth doing and why.
Actual Response: “Maybe not today but we need to be educating them and moving them towards it in the future before some groovy digital agency swoops in and pitches them leaving them thinking ‘Why didn’t my PR agency tell me this?’”
Excuse 3: “I’ve read Twitter, I get it, I just don’t want to be using it personally.”
Internal Response: Yeah, that’s what my gran said, unfortunately I wouldn’t trust my gran to consult with clients after having ‘read a few of the twitters’ and I don’t trust you either.
Actual: “Hmm, yeah, I’d argue that as media professionals unfortunately we have to go above and beyond consumer understanding of media and really get to grips with features, etiquette, community etc. You don’t have to share your personal life, you could develop your professional profile online, our social media policy has some guidelines.”
Excuse 4: “We have a specialist digital team working on social media briefs.”
Internal response: Yeah, I saw that digital account exec sizing up your corner office the other day. Good luck with that.
External response: “Sure, and your skills and knowledge are still relevant but with online channels playing a bigger and bigger role in media consumption it would be good if we all had a decent base level of knowledge.”
Excuse 5: “I’m just not techie.”
Internal response: No sh*t. I saw you getting flustered with your Nokia 3310 but I’m sure even you use Google on a daily basis right?
External Response: “That’s OK, you don’t have to understand the techie bit behind how everything works, you just have to know how the average person uses it.”
Ok, so what I’ve written is a bit harsh and bit scary. Don’t get me wrong, no one knows how hard PRs work than me. I think what most PRs do is great and I’m not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater and everything you know is useless. What I am saying is that I want to see you getting to grips with new media, socia media, digital, interactive marketing, whatever it is this thing is called. No ifs no buts, you’re better than that.
Cleaning up communications
Earlier in the year when I started #fixPR I wanted to stop the PR bashing and share solutions. We’re not all perfect and we don’t have a lot of time but, at the risk of sounding cheesy, if we all work together as an industry we could effect change.
Some people joined in and started debating the issues (and I thank them for their contributions) but since then I’ve noticed it’s still far more likely to see people taking a pop at each other and dragging the collective industry down. FFS!
Enter Claire Thompson and the successsfull thupr events. Claire has dedicated the next one to ‘Cleaning up Communications‘ which is a chance to “put away the bolly and look at some of the campaigns to help raise the game and have a collective think about what can be done in future…”
Claire has invited me to talk more about #fixPR (thank you) in good company with:
- Richard Ellis, PRCA (Public Relations Consultants Association)
- Molly Flatt, 1000 Heads, offering the online perspective
- Adam Parker, Realwire, on An Inconvenient PR Truth
- Tim Phillips, freelance journalist, on Talk Normal
I’d love it if you could attend, not just because we’ve managed to get women speakers outnumbering men (wow, finally representative of the PR industry) but because I’d like it to be an event where we actually SAY something and not just sit around stroking our own egos.
I’m in a bit of a feisty phase at the moment - so if you know me at all it should be fun 
Please come along and add to the collective intelligence if you’re impacted by communications in any way; PR, writer, content producer, marketer, whatever…
[Image: DanBrady]
Why PR is losing the social media battle: Day Four (Post Three)
#fixPR: The Doctor is in
I was kind of hoping by mid-week some other people might’ve chimed in with best practice and ideas to #fixpr, which a few have. Here’s what I’ve spotted so far if you want to add your #fixpr posts/all-time favourites in the comments I’ll keep updating the list:
Tone
Blogger outreach
- Kerry Gaffney ‘Proactive blogger engagement – Should PRs bother?‘
- Jed Hallam ‘Blogger outreach: why you must do it‘
- Chris Nee ‘Blogger outreach: A bloggers view‘
SEO
- Paul Sutton ‘SEO for PR: Understanding keywords and backlinks‘
Why PR is losing the social media battle: Day Three
Argh, is it really only 3 days since I started mobilising people to #fixPR?
Where did it go wrong and how can we fix it….?
Measurement
PR agrees to be measured by some really dumb things sometimes
Before I even continue I have to reference Measurement Camp as probably the best group looking at this issue and pro actively solving it with industry-wide collaboration. They have an excellent wiki and hold regular meetups. This will probably be more useful to you than anything you’ll read here.
So listen, PR is not a Google Adwords campaign. Yet time and again PRs agree to, and dare I say even suggest, that a campaign’s success hangs on whether it drove traffic to a website or microsite. While I’m not saying that social media measurement shouldn’t look to drive traffic, it doesn’t have to be the be all and end all for a few reasons:
- PR activity will never drive comparable volume traffic like Search and Advertising campaigns
- A link resulting from PR activity is online ‘forever’ so, unlike a Search campaign you shouldn’t be evaluated within a set time
- PR links don’t have conversion rates like online advertising does, that’s because they’re supposed to do very different things, so why apply the same measurement?
- Sometimes a website or microsite isn’t the core offering, so consumers ultimately aren’t very interested to go there
You'll never win comparing apples and oranges
I know it’s not uncommon for a Marketing Director to say “Well I’ll get more bang for my buck by putting money I would’ve given towards PR into online advertising and SEO.”
Come on PR! You don’t need to compete in that way. You are well versed in how to debate the old PR vs Advertising issue. You just need to update the script to a social media version. [In fact, one advantage to online PR activity is for the first time the traditional PR metric of word-of-mouth can actually be measured by a host of “buzz monitoring” tools.]
Ok, so what *should* you measure? Well you *should* set some objectives first. We know it’s bad practice but it’s amazing how many social media drives are initiated and then everyone gets to the end and isn’t sure (or even worse, disagrees) whether it was successful.
In addition setting an objective means that you may not know exactly what to measure but you’ll know what you want to achieve and can check a range of data to see if you’re doing that.
Let’s use an analogy that three different businesses wanting to start something in social media are like three people who decide to take up running.
Person 1 – wants to run a marathon
Person 2 – wants to be fitter for their 5-a-side team
Person 3 – has just moved to the city and wants to join a club to meet people
All three will approach learning to run in different ways because they have very different objectives (i.e. you wouldn’t all jump on Twitter and try and grow to as many followers as possible)
Imagine if we said at the end of a couple of months “Ok, who can run the longest and furthest. That person’s the winner”. Obviously Person 1 would’ve been trained for endurance and perhaps completed a marathon by now, it wouldn’t be fair to hold the other runners to the same measurement when they wanted to achieve different things.
Let’s say Person 2’s five-a-side team had won every game and they’d managed to play each game the whole way through without alternating with other players. W00T, they’re a winner!
Person 3 may not be a great runner at all, but have made lots of friends in the process, which was their key aim in running in the first place. Yay, they’re a winner too!
What about if Person 2 also found that they’d lost a stone and reduced their cholesterol? That would be a happy side benefit, no? You’d be mad to say “sorry, that’s not of interest”.
My point is…are you still with me… you have to measure what’s important to the business and you also have to include positive and unexpected benefits as part of learning what works in social media for a particular brand.
If you’re realistic about what’s possible from the outset (remember you wouldn’t measure offline PR directly by sales, don’t make the same mistake online) then you can define your own benchmarks and success metrics from a range of options.
Being facetious I propose the following social media measurement scale. I call it the “Ahrens Scale”a.k.a “The Good Thing, Bad Thing scale”
Here’s how you would apply it.
Drove traffic = Good Thing
Resulted a in a lot of negative commentary and formation of a hate group on Facebook = Bad Thing
Got a link from a blog or website = Good Thing
No increase in online conversation in any way = Bad Thing
Your online content re-purposed and re-used by online fans = Good Thing
Data capture = Good Thing
Rich media content like images or video was submitted by users = Good Thing
You created a Microsite = Bad Thing (Just kidding, I have a love/hate relationship with microsites)
Who could fix this?
- Monitoring providers: Need to sell their products based on measurement benefits “you can track and measure X, Y, Z”
- Agencies: Update your social media knowledge, study good practice, so you can lead on metrics
Solution? Become expert in what can be measured, then apply relevant metrics to pre-defined objectives. Shout about unexpected side benefits which result from activity.
Crib notes:
- It’s a no brainer: Set objectives before activity starts
- Don’t measure by non-PR measurables
- Look for side benefits and then perhaps use as benchmark or KPI for next time
- Don’t build microsites (Kidding again!)
Why PR is losing the social media battle: Day Two
Part two in a series of posts looking at PR’s bad rap when it comes to social media. Where did it go wrong and how to fix it…
PR doesn’t understand the internet
PRs, I love you, but you still don’t understand the internet. I don’t mean in the way that my mum doesn’t understand the internet, but basic stuff like Google.
A few years ago we worked with a national newspaper to get a write up on a client, this included that all important link from the publication’s website to the client’s website. Links are good right? Between patting ourselves on the back I called the client
Me: “We got [national newspaper] to write about you and they linked to your site!”
Client: “Meh. Yeah we only got about two traffic referrals from the article so big whoop. BTW I just spoke to our SEO agency, could you instead get us coverage from [other major news site] and [another niche site]?”
After smashing the phone in frustration while dying a little inside hanging up I decided to call my client’s Search agency. SEO is considered as evil, if not more so, than PR. I didn’t know what to expect but here’s how it went…
Me: “We do PR for CLIENT and I need to know what you need us to know”
SEO: “Wow! Thanks for calling! It’s so great to hear from a client’s PR agency. You guys do great work which is very valuable to us.”
The internet: Revolutionary but not evolutionary
I’m sorry - Great work? Valuable? The SEO agency went further than stroking our egos. They sent over a list of the top sites, ranked in order of importance, where it was important for our client to be mentioned or linked from. They also sent us a list of keywords we should be including in all campaign activity and offered to check over press releases and make sure they were optimised.
Basically they’d handed me an online media target list, tweaked our messaging, and profiled our target audience in some detail. And they weren’t just being nice [Incidentally they were nice but were mainly giving me the info to support their work].
That’s when I realised that for all my lofty ideals about social media and communities, influencers and engagement; I didn’t really know how the internet really worked, yet I was trying to harness it for clients.
At the heart of this point is Search, but also the ways people use the web to collate and share information once they’ve found it, and online purchasing processes where E-Commerce is in place.
Nothing illustrated more to me recently that PRs still don’t get important concepts like Search more than a recent PR week debate around SMNRs [SMRs. Worth they paper they're printed on?]
Some PRs were talking about SMNRs as if they were just a paper press release on the internet. Many looked at it with an old PR mentality without considering how they might be part of a wider online marketing mix. Of the six opinions captured, and a host of comments, only a few showed an understanding of how an optimized and online release might fit with new PR methodology (Adam Zand, Ian McKee, Mark O’Toole, Ann Krauss – you stood out to me).
Yeah, yeah, I’m no expert but I have tried to broaden my knowledge of the web and internet marketing over the years.
What I know now can still only fill the back of a napkin but here it is:
- When PR and SEO aligns they maximise each other’s value
- PR actually creates content (great for Organic vs. Paid Search) which is beneficial online over time - not just the duration of an Adwords campaign
- The internet is tracking lots of useful stuff, go find and use that data
- Social media activity can work with online sales [Just don't use it as the only yard-stick. More to come on measurement]
- Most social features aren’t just ‘nice to have’ web add-ons but powerful tools which serve important functions
- Knowing how to do even a basic Boolean Search has to be learnt I’m afraid
- There’s usually a tool, service, or application that can make your job easier. Example: Nobody has to read 50 blog posts a day, use an RSS reader people! (I’m not joking it still kills me how many PRs don’t know about this) Paid or free, 9 times out of 10 there is a tool you could be using – and where there isn’t, well, you might have identified a potential revenue stream by creating it and reselling to others
Who could fix this?
- Agencies: Invest in extensive internal education. Don’t stop there, create partnerships with specialist service providers who complement your expertise
- In-house: Internally, make sure you’re working with your web team. Externally, connect relevant agencies to work together
SOLUTION? Gone are the days of keeping everyone in their boxes. If we’re going to benefit from everything the internet has to offer, we have to use everything the internet has to offer.
Crib notes:
- At a minimum PR and SEO should be working together
- The data’s out there somewhere. Find it and use it
- The web’s a wonderful place, your PR team’s knowledge should reflect that
- You can’t do it all on your own: use good tools and work with good people
About:
I'm Darika Ahrens and I help brands develop marketing strategies for Social Media. My background is in Public Relations for companies like Orange, Microsoft, Philips, HTC, Yell.com, and Estee Lauder. I've worked with and trained some of the UK's top agencies.