The Moral and Ethical dilemma of blogger relations: Email Addresses

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:04:49 +0000

Lets talk about the age old question about the differences between bloggers and journalists from the main stream media. First a categorization. To us there are 3 broad categories of people you can target to generate buzz.

1. Main stream media – journalists, reporters, freelancers, editors and publishers of magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, etc. These professionals are paid to learn and write about news and happenings. Our main competitors including Vocus and Cision (and smaller ones like Burrelles Luce) provide extensive information on over 40,000 of these professionals with their media database offering. Any media database has typically information about the publication, its reach, the beat the reporter covers and the reporters contact information (email and in some cases phone).

2. Blog Networks – Since early part of this decade, online publications that started as small one person blogs such as GigaOm and TechCrunch, now have multiple writers and editors with a fairly similar agenda to the main stream media but a focus on specific content such as startups (e.g. Paid Content) or social media (e.g. Mashable). The writers for these have a revenue (and hence pageviews, readership) goal either via sponsorships and advertising so they are also “pitched” by PR professionals. Some of these professionals encourage and lovehaving their contact information available online (providing an easy way for potential PR professionals to contact them) and others dont like being “spammed” with irrelevant pitches.

3. Independent bloggers – These are the mostly one person industry experts – Some of them love to have people email and contact them about new products and services – e.g. Louis Gray, (disclaimer: he’s helping us) and others feel its spam.

Our customers prefer to have the contact information for all of the folks in our database. We have about 80% of our targets mapped to email and phone, but we are choosing in our present version to NOT show direct contact information for the individual bloggers until we are certain they are not going to be used for sending useless PR pitchesand get blacklisted.

We currently allow our customers to comment on their blogs or news sites, but do offer contact information for the main stream media.

What’s your suggestion for the best way to encourage engagement between these 3 categories of influencers and the best way for our customers to get access to them?

5 simple tips for hosting a great blogger event

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:52:11 +0000

Robert pointed me to 19 things to consider when planning a blogger launch event by the Mobile industry review. I read through it left with very mixed feelings. On one hand it was pretty open and clear about things they like or dont like. On the other hand they seemed like a bunch of prima donna’s asking for free handsets, asking hosts to pay attention to food. Anyway it got me thinking about the blogger events we have hosted and what we learned from them.

When we hosted blogger outreach events at my previous company the question always comes up about a) What are the best things to do and b) how do you measure the success of such an event. So I thought I’d take a stab at 5 simple tips to being a great host for a blogger event.

1. Figure out the level of your bloggers and cater to their specific need: Tech bloggers like to actually play with the products, see demos, etc. The last thing you want to do with this crowd is to put 30 min PowerPoint slides upfront about your company, culture, market etc. If the bloggers are more strategic in their thinking and not the hands-on type, it makes more sense to provide access to C-level executives who can provide their opinions on the market, stategy, etc.

2. Location and time matter a lot: This is an obivious one, but where you host your event tells a lot about the importance you place to the event. I would highly recommend hosting your blogger event at your company. Pick a relatively large sized room and keep the number of attendees from your company to about 1/2 the number of bloggers invited. With respect to time, most full-time bloggers prefer lunch or late evening (early pizza) times, but dont attempt breakfast blogger sessions. Having tried 3 I can tell you they always start late, end late and mess up the rest of the day.

3. Giveaways: Highly recommend keeping them consistent with the brand and theme of your product / company. We hosted 2 blogger events and had a nice table top logo bean plant giveaway and a flash drive with the press release, latest whitepaper and product details pre loaded on them.

4. Measurement of effectiveness: The only measurement we did was to learn how many of the 21 bloggers invited to the first event showed up, how many blogged about the event and what the general sentiment was. The bloggers collectively had an audience of about 35,000 unique visitors and the cost of the event was about $1500. The total number of bloggers that wrote about the event was 11 (18 of the 21 invited showed up). The collective audience of the ones that did write about the event was about 8900. Treat it as any other press event. There were other benefits we got from the event – good will, some link love, but those were more difficult to measure.

5. The right people attending and available to answer questions. Believe me, most bloggers are there more for learning and sharing than for the food. The best thing you can provide to them is access to the right people in the company that will be able to build that connection with them so they can understand more about the company, the culture and products. Depending on the type and level of audience, make the right folks from your company available to discuss with them.

Buzzgain » Blogger Relations

The Moral and Ethical dilemma of blogger relations: Email Addresses

5 simple tips for hosting a great blogger event