Blogger Relations: Beginner’s POV

At Podcamp Toronto 2010, during the recoding Inside PR, an interesting question came up: How should a PR practitioner pitch a blogger? After deciding we didn’t really know that much, we as dutiful students, decided to educate ourselves on the subject.

The search came up with many different opinions; some interesting advice comes from Todd Defren.

His  post gave quick tips that are available on a handy reference card which can be found here. It is a great resource for students and PR newbies. But to our dismay, the post explains how PR is full of young, eager and aggressive people (us, and possibly you) who can be trained on this stuff but still make mistakes when pitching bloggers. Scary to hear for soon to be new grads but learning now will help to avoid this type of catastrophe.

C.C. Chapman also gives advice worth noting. This post lists 5 things you shouldn’t do when pitching a blogger. The most interesting one was “Don’t pretend the pitch isn’t a pitch.” Someone, somewhere probably considered this idea to be brilliant (until getting called out on it).

So, if you’re ever asked how to successfully pitch a blogger, you should have a basic idea of how to do so from these sources!

If you are new to PR like us, we hope this information was helpful and if you have any of your own ideas or “real world” experience, please leave us your comments.

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