Three best practices when engaging with independent bloggers

Solid video Shahed, thanks for the insight!  Access as you define it is something which I think is typically neglected when we think of blogger relations.

It seems like when engaging a blogger in conversation, it’s got to be centered on organic involvement.  So if your client is in consumer tech, you really have to live and breathe that space.  Personally, you need to be genuinely curious about everything to do with that sector. Otherwise, the conversation you initiate is just as disingenuous and contrived, as if you found a quick list of the top 10 blogs in consumer tech and pitched them immediately, isn’t it?

Perhaps bloggers (or anyone for that matter) are simply not that perceptive, and so engaging in a token discussion that leads to a subsequent pitch, is enough.  I’m interested to hear about the lifecycle of some successful PR/blogger relationships--future Merritt blog post?

Or perhaps (less cynicism, more controversy) bloggers and PR ops may have the potential to be a better, more mutually beneficial pairing, than PR and traditional media.

Thanks for your comments Chris. Great suggestion for a f/u post as well. Pragmatic examples of the process involved in developing blogger and PR relationships might spark some further discussion.

To address your point, independent bloggers are becoming more and more perceptive of, and accustomed to, PR interactions. The simple reason is that they’re having these interactions more often. As you say, disingenous and contrived attempts at conversation simply don’t work. It’s about interaction, understanding that individual blogger’s voice and providing content that the blog and its readers will appreciate.