Avoid the Clueless Blog Pitch

Suw Charman posts about fellow Corante blogger Michael O’Connor Clarke’s recent experience with a clueless pitch posted as a comment on his blog. The pitch was completely unrelated to the post, and in bad form, left as a comment. Charman targets the pitch as comment spam (something that has frustrated me enough to recently close the comments on the Capulet blog), and chastises the company and the person sending the pitch.

I’m not impressed. There are many effective ways to reach bloggers, but comment spam isn’t one of them, and any internet marketing company which fails to grasp the conversational nature of blogs obviously doesn’t understand an increasingly large chunk of the internet and, I would say, is probably just as full of shit as the next snakeoil SEO salesman.

If you want to get your story out to bloggers, try putting a bit of effort in and actually having a conversation.

We actually received the same pitch, but it was filled out in our company contact form (our preferred method of unsolicited contact) and the subject line simply asked us to please fill out their survey. While the email was not personalized, it was still a better point of contact than the comment left on O’Connor Clarke’s blog. Charman makes a great comparison between this pitch and another company that emailed her directly because they thought their product might be of interest and relevance to her. It worked, as she included the company’s good pitching practices in her post. I agree with Charman that sending a personal, relevant email to a blogger is a much better way to get your point across and generate a positive response from the blogging community.