Stories from the Blog Relations Trench

Tom Murphy asked several questions about blog relations, and seeks stories from the trenches. Here’s the reply I posted to his comments:
Thus far, we’ve found bloggers very responsive to our pitches. Obviously, it’s important to undertake a more informal, marketing-speak-free approach but they generally strike me as less cynical than journalists. Bloggers tend to be flattered that we’re interested in pitching stories to them. That will probably change with time (and an increase in popularity).

Because (I think) we’ve been upfront about who we are and what we want, we haven’t had any negative feedback from bloggers. If they’re uninterested in looking at the product or service we’re pitching, they say so (or don’t reply at all) and that’s cool.

We use tools like Technorati and the Blogosphere Ecosystem to evaluate the relative popularity of bloggers. Frequency of updates and number of comments are other pertinent factors.

We track success the same way we do with journalists–who wrote about our client and what did they say? On average, we’ve enjoyed a higher rate of return with bloggers than journalists. On the other hand, the average blogger may have a smaller readership than the average journalist (though that readership is generally more targeted). These feedster search results demonstrates a recent success we had pitching Rococo Software’s new Bluetooth developer kit for Linux.