How To Pitch A Blogger: Be One

Geoff Livingston really hits the mark on how to market to bloggers.

I still get pitches from PR agents with little understanding of what I'm writing about or what impact I have on a particular community.

They're stuck in tracking numbers (if they're good), or tracking Search Engine Rank (if they're lazy). The idea that Google knows best has gone way too far into the marketing mindset.

But Geoff gives an excellent overall description of what you should be doing to work with bloggers to market your product at Buzz Bin.

Specific tactics will continue to evolve in this realm as bloggers and social networks determine how they want to be communicated to… But the major issue with pitching towards bloggers is that when this occurs, a company’s community participation tactics are not strong enough to command respect without having to push. When strong social network relationships are not in play, news that may be of interest to a community cannot be communicated naturally and virally. This puts an organization or company in a position of weakness as it forces marketing to promote initiatives rather than to attract attention. Social media is not conducive towards this kind of promotion.

Basically, if your first interaction with a blogger is your product pitch or press release, you're not doing it right. Throwing pitches to bloggers gives them either 1) an inflated sense of self-importance, or 2) reduces them to the level of paid shills like the PPP dupes who lease out their blogspace for a few measly dollars.

To be effective, a blogger must be trusted. To be trusted, they must be part of a community.
For a company to be trusted, they have to join that community, discover who is important in that community, and then determine if they are open to helping pitch products openly.

It takes work to do this. You have to spend time reading blogs, and commenting, and hopefully blogging yourself. It's hard to measure. It's hard to get clients to pay for it. But ultimately, it's the only sure-fire way to get results that have any real impact.

If your goal is simply to create false metrics (like number of fake comments you can leave), then go ahead - bill your clients and tell them how much buzz you generated. If you want to truly make an impact a brand, put in the hard work.

What does that mean for agencies? It means that most won't be able to use social media marketing to pitch their product. It requires more interaction from the client (read: the client has to do much of the work for it to be authentic). This has been the difficult thing to teach - social media marketing is relationship-building on a one-to-one basis. It's at its most effective when you get other people to help pitch your product for free.

If you are an agency getting paid to produce results, how can you convince the unpaid evangelists that they shouldn't be paid, when they are doing the majority of the work? And what do you do when they figure out you were using them?

This is why social media marketing has been ineffective and expensive. You have to learn what makes bloggers get involved, and to learn that, you have to be one.