"PR People Are Morons" says Russell Beattie

Russell Beattie, Yahoo! mobile evangelist and mobile blogger, has been ranting about PR people trying to hop on the blogging bandwagon. And when self-proclaimed blogging PR guru, Steve Rubel attempted to remonstrate, Russell's attack got specific and personal, using a recent attempt by Steve's company as a case study in how not to do things.

Russell's main argument is that PR people are seeking to influence (or even manipulate) bloggers and that's a bad thing, per se. It leads to a degrading of the quality of discussion between bloggers themselves and everyone else involved in the conversation.

I do take Russell's point and have had my own run ins with PR people, particularly when they leave comment spam. Anyone who knows the first thing about bloggers would also appreciate that comments are a particularly sensitive subject and would avoid them like the plague.

However, I also think that a happy medium is perfectly possible and I welcome approaches from all PR people - and indeed anyone seeking to try to get exposure and coverage for products. However, there are big, big caveats to that.

Here's some of my thoughts on how to approach me if you want me to think about writing about your company or clients:

1. Targeting

PR is a marketing discipline and like any form of marketing should be tightly targeted to the recipient. Anything that people send me should be concerned with what I write about, which is primarily mobile phones, but can include a fairly eclectic mix of other tech areas.

I am not interested in receiving information about other things under any circumstances and may even be hostile - maybe publicly hostile - if you send me stuff about (in no particular order) cat food, cookery, space technology or lighting. These examples are selected from my email inbox in the last month.

This isn't a new thing and good PR agencies never send out information which they think a journalist (in its most inclusive sense) isn't going to print.

It's not just that though. It also has to be interesting to my readers, in my view. So if you've changed your name from the ABC Mobile Widget Company to the ABC Mobile Company, I'd rather you kept the "news" to yourself. Again, this isn't new, it's something good PR people do already and the best will even stand up to clients who insist that they send out this kind of rubbish press release.

2. Comments

Never, ever try to use my blog's comments to promote your products. No, that's not ever. You have been warned.

3. Press Releases

I'm a blogger and my motivation for writing is difficult to isolate, but it's not for the money. Well, not yet anyway :-)

This means that unlike many journeyman journalists I'm doing it for pride. Press releases were invented primarily to make journalist's lives easier and many releases are faithfully reprinted accordingly. (Not all journalists do this, by any means).

This doesn't apply to bloggers. We're not looking for an easy life. And we're not very interested in the spin PR people often try to put in press releases either. So personally, I'd hold back the press release, or at the very least don't make it the hero of your approach.

I'm far more likely to respond to a nice, short email with a link to a website I might find interesting. Then I can make up my own mind and draw my own conclusions. I'm also a little more likely to respond if the email is from the CEO/VP Marketing of the company, rather than a PR agency, if I'm honest, but that's not mandatory. Hey, some of my best friends are PR people :-)

4. Know thy blogger

Unfortunately, there aren't any shortcuts to this. Certain bloggers are going to be more receptive to a PR approach than others. The only way of finding out about this is to read and analyse blogs. This includes the topics they cover, but also frequency and type of post they write.

It's pretty obvious to anyone who reads Russell Beattie that he's unlikely to respond to a PR approach - especially now :-) But even before his rant, I'd have said that he's unlikely to be receptive, just from the subjects he's written about in the past. And the Microsoft angle? Dear me, no. No, no and no again.

Some blogs also may be disproportionately influential within their specialist sphere. In other words, they may be read by relatively few people, but these readers are important, either because they're powerful within their companies or that industry, or they are other bigger bloggers. Don't forget that blogging is much concerned with linking to other blogs, so if the right blogger picks up on your story, other bloggers will discover it for themselves. Thus the original blogger will have done all your work for you.

5. Respect

A little respect goes a long way. Don't try to pretend you're a blogging PR expert - there's two reasons for this.

i) No one is, right now. We're all learning how to get along, so let's be honest about this.

ii) If you haven't got a (successful) blog yourself, you won't understand. So anyone who claims to know about this area had better be able to point to their own blog, or approach the area with a fair slug of humility.

That's my thoughts so far on PR and blogging. No where near as extreme as Russell Beattie. But no where near as patronising as Steve Rubel's response to him either, I hope - which could be the real reason for Russell's grumpy response.

Comments

[Carlo Longino]

I tend to agree with the sentiment of Russ' posts, if not necessarily way he said it! Russell's hints above are a good start, with #4 being the most crucial. The good PR people that I've worked with have taken that to heart.

Thought I'd share this comment I made on Russ' blog:

The point that Russ made that's being lost in all of this is that far, far too often PR people make these "pitches" (which is a generous term) with absolutely no research on the people they send them to or their work. It's almost as if there's some expectation that because people write blogs, they'll post about anything.

These types of pitch emails are akin to LinkedIn or Plaxo spam -- "Hi, you don't know me, but..." The good PR people that I've worked with (which are sadly far, far outnumbered by the bad ones) have done their homework, read some of my previous work, and have some understanding of what I write about, and tailor their pitches accordingly. Sending reporters and bloggers stuff that clearly they're not interested in wastes their time and diminishes the PR person's, their firm's and their client's credibility.

The thing that gets me the most about this is Steve's "Tough noogies" response, which echoes what other (bad) PR people have said when I've raised this same issue with them. It reeks of the arrogance that pervades bad PR -- after all, here's somebody Steve unsuccessfully pitched offering (albeit in a roundabout way) advice on how better to approach him and other bloggers. But, I guess since Steve is the king of blogs when it comes to PR -- his approach is right, no matter how bloggers actually respond to it. Seems to fit the MO of bad PR: don't adapt to the medium or individual, force them to adapt to you.