There are several articles on how to Do It Yourself PR. I read one by Jimmy this morning most of which can be attributed to Jason Calacanis. There are several tactics to DIY PR, but there are 3 main strategies that we recommend.

1. Listen: Pick the topics / categories, areas of interest in your field and listen to what’s being said by key influencers – these include reporters, journalists, analysts (like Gartner, etc.) bloggers, micro-bloggers, video-bloggers, podcasters, and photographers.

After you listen for about a day you’ll get a picture of who’s who (or the landscape) in this space.

2. Learn: Pick about 20-30 of these influencers and get as much detail about them as possible. What do they write about? When do they write? Who is their audience? What do they care about? What topics interest them? What are unique stories you can tell them about your startup?

3. Engage: Attend relevant events that your influencers go to. There’s no substitute for face-to-face discussions. Commenting on blogs is the best way to make the initial engagement. Write and manage your blog by “joining the discussion”.

The key is discipline and making sure you do it consistently. You need to show and see results, but dont expect to get written up on the WSJ within a week of starting this process.

Image credit: http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk ]]> http://news.buzzgain.com/how-to-do-it-yourself-pr/feed/ 0 http://news.buzzgain.com/the-moral-and-ethical-dilemma-of-blogger-relations-email-addresses/ http://news.buzzgain.com/the-moral-and-ethical-dilemma-of-blogger-relations-email-addresses/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:04:49 +0000 Mukund http://news.buzzgain.com/?p=60

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?