Pitching and Online Influencers

I thought I’d pass along a couple of links to two recent posts about PR and bloggers. Last week Matthew Podboy linked to a PR Week article about Managing the new breed of online influencers. Here’s a link to the original article, it uses Podboy’s company Voce as an example of a PR firm practicing positive blogger relations. There are some useful tips on technique in the article:

• Do be conversational in your outreach, as blogs are a conversational medium
• Do research the blogger before reaching out, as you would with any other journalist
• Do read blogs regularly so you get to know the medium well
• Don’t pitch or send press releases
• Don’t use PR or marketing language
• Don’t send anything to a blogger that you don’t want to see on the blog five minutes after you do so

Via Steve Rubel, an article from TechCrunch on the Top Ten Things You can Do to Get Blogged. This is less about pitching bloggers, and more about participating in the blogosphere, but it is a good primer for anyone wanting more information about how to get noticed, and more importantly, how not to.