An Army Of Bloggers Can Ruin Your Day
By Kirk BiglioneBlogger relations are an increasingly important aspect of corporate public relations work. Unfortunately, many PR professionals still don’t quite get the blogosphere. All too many assume that they can simply send an impersonal form letter or press release out to their mailing list, then sit back and wait for the free publicity to roll in. More often than not this approach invites ridicule from bloggers and can lead to a surprising amount of negative publicity. Exactly the opposite of what was intended.
The problem is so prevalent that a company named Vocus has developed a software solution designed to help PR professionals communicate more effectively with bloggers. To promote their new product, Vocus has released a white paper titled “Five Golden Rules For Blogger Relations”. We learned about the white paper earlier this week when the Vocus marketing department sent out an impersonal form letter to their entire mailing list — including a number of high profile bloggers.
Brian Clarke at Copyblogger was clearly amused, and a little insulted. He quoted most of the email message in a post, including the bit about the worst case scenario where bloggers might quote your email in an attempt to ridicule your company.
It was only a matter of time before other blogs started picking up on the story — many because the blogger had received the same email message. Word spread rapidly and everyone had a good laugh at Vocus’s expense.
Talk about the wrong kind of viral marketing.
Vocus managed to recreate the exact scenario that they are allegedly trying to help their customers avoid. As blogging PR screw-ups go, this one was a classic.
So how did things go so horribly wrong for Vocus? They broke their own rules — all five of them.
Worse yet, they apparently didn’t use their own software. The company claims to have spent thousands of hours building an extensive database of the most influential bloggers. Next time they might want to compare that list against the list of addresses they’re sending their marketing email to.
To be fair, the company owned up to its mistake and even offered a fairly reasonable explanation for what had occurred. As it turns out Vocus acquired PRWeb last year. The email in question was sent to all PRWeb customers. One of the problems, though, is that none of this was explained in the email. Instead, the message came across as pure spam from a company the recipients had no previous relationship with.
My guess is that everyone at Vocus learned a valuable lesson from this experience. If nothing else they learned that the scenario portrayed in their marketing email is a very real phenomenon.
There’s quite a bit of effort involved in building and maintaining effective relationships with bloggers. It isn’t a process that can be automated. While a database of blogger contact information might be a useful starting point, it’s not a replacement for personal contact with individual bloggers.