Email Pitching A Blogger? Try This –

The perfect pitch. Any public relations practitioner has scratched their head a time or two when it comes to reaching out to bloggers. For awhile it was touch territory, but there has been great progression in peoples understanding of contacting bloggers with content that might be appealing for them to cover. However, there is still a lot of poor practice going on. i.e. mass pitching, irrelevant content, and always exciting content waterfall pitch.

A lot of the best practices (for a lack of better words) of contacting bloggers has come from trial and error – resulting in blacklisting – advice from bloggers, and practitioners starting to “just get” how you reach someone online as part of a normal social setting. Generally, you wouldn’t talk to a person/prospect friend about car parts at a party when you know they hate cars. It doesn’t make for good conversation and nobody benefits from the inevitable awkward silence.(I realize this does happen…)  Now traditional social circles are finally playing a role in online interactions thanks to growing blog communities and Facebook.

I came across a blog post by Alex Wilhelm (thenextweb.com) that delivers the point about pitching to tech bloggers. The post is full of sound advice in a clear message that every one could benefit from when preparing to contacting a new blogger. The scenario doesn’t have to be tech bloggers only, and industry applies because the post gives social context to interacting with bloggers. Like it or not bloggers are like you and me – they have social interactions and circles of friends. They are more that happy to interact with you if you take the time to understand their interests, provide valuable information, and treat them with respect. Interesting how that sounds more and more like building a bond/friendship, well ultimately it is.

This issue has been around for a while now, but like mentioned earlier progress in evident. Thanks Alex for a great post.

What the Client Wants the Client Gets

Today as  I was trolling the Twitterverse and can across a tweet from Todd Defren (@TDefren) about his recent blog post “Aligning For Client Satisfaction.” The overall post was interesting in itself, but a couple pointed comments really stood out to me on client satisfaction.

• As professionals we tend to get stuck in the weeds; and
• Raising the question “What do MOST clients care the Most about?”

Now, these are simple thoughts and most would say they always care about what the client wants. However, these two points are constantly looked over and take a back seat to getting things done and the ever diminishing time factor. You may think this doesn’t apply to you or your organization and if that’s the case I challenge you to quickly define your clients needs. Then define how your team practices consistency to reach those needs. Does your plan increase productive output for client objectives?

Often our thoughts as practitioners involve complicated tactics with innovative processes and crafty theatrics, but does the end game result in the clients true care?

While hacking through the weeds break throughs come and excitement and possibilities spark. But before getting to far into the tactical mapping, remember to ask the simple question: Are the weeds impairing the vision? How will this impact my clients MOST important need?

Happy clients mean objectives are being met which in return means you’re producing good work which ultimately mean more clients and recognition.