Jackie Danicki

Niall Kennedy is asking bloggers to fill out the Technorati/Edelman Blogger PR survey. It’s very brief, so I was happy to. My answers? Not all so brief. For posterity’s sake, here’s how I answered a question on what PR people can do to communicate more effectively with bloggers:

1. Don’t send me emails with huge attachments (the Word doc with a useless, 8MB high res image embedded was a particularly good entry to the “How stupid can PR people be?” awards).

2. Give me access to full RSS feeds of truly valuable information and updates - NOT spam - about your product or service.

3. Stop the PDF madness. Very few documents actually need to be PDFs; if they are, you should provide it not as an attachment but via a link to the PDF on a web server. You should also provide a link to an HTML version for ease of quoting and reference.

4. Don’t assume that I’m going to be grateful to receive your press release. One PR sent me an email with the subject “Here’s some good info for your blog”. Er, not really.

5. Keep your promises. The Fox Searchlight PR team behind the film Sideways offered me prize packs for my readers if I had a quiz or essay contest related to the film on my blog. I was happy to do so, offering my readers the prize packs as bait (being clear that this was a promotional exercise for the movie). Sadly, the PR people never sent me the prize packs, and never answered my emails chasing them to do so. Lame, stupid, and dirty.

6. Don’t hound. If I tell you that I think that my readers may be interested in learning about your client’s product or service, and that I may blog about it, don’t pester me to do so.

7. Talk to me like you may just be human, too. The best PR who’s ever contacted me, Amy Nathan of D’Arcy Skincare, has this down pat. Her emails are very chatty without being overly familiar, and they’re definitely devoid of any cringeworthy PR-speak. I actually look forward to getting messages from her.

8. Be gracious if I don’t give your product or service a rave review. You’ll score more points for your client if you do.

9. Tell me the truth about how you got my email address.

10. Don’t try to promote your product in my blog comments.

Link via Loic Le Meur

Filed under: Blogging, PR, RSS Subscriptions