Blogging has hit the mainstream when it comes to making PR pitches.  Most of the PR professionals we have worked with or talked to, always have a strategy for hitting the blogs. Publications like TechCrunch can make or break a startup, or at least get them a lot of initial traction.  A lot of people have asked us, “So how should I pitch bloggers?” So here is a list of tips and hints, along with a few good must read articles related to the subject.

1.  Familiarize Yourself With The Blog-  Find out who the main staff is, what they do, and possibly what they may have done in the past.  Most Gawker blogs list this on the left.  Get a feel for what they write about and certain hot points.  Every blogger has certain companies or technologies they find to be interesting.  For Example, I love enterprise 2.0.  Much more likely to get me to write about Enterprise 2.0 versus An MP3 player.  
2. Don’t Boilerplate and Mess It Up-  Do you know how many times a blogger has gotten an invite to review a product, but the name and contact info is for another blogger?  Many bloggers are used to boilerplate press releases, but at least have some dignity with it.  Try to avoid boilerplate and standardized emails if you can.
3.  Be Relevant- Please please have a clue about what the blog is.  Do not pitch a gadget review to an Enterprise 2.0 blog or vice versa.  Check editorial calendars if the blog has it.  This is more likely to happen on larger blogs like CNET.  Also see what stories they’re running, or try to read posts for what they might be looking for.  For example, Read/Write/Web asked for Facebook collaboration tools.  
4.  Offering a Product Trial Does Not= A Positive Review- Guess what?  Free stuff doesn’t buy good coverage.  In some cases, it might even backfire on you.  Remember the Acer/Vista/Ferrari laptop scandal from last year?  .  Also be sure to answer any technical questions they may have.  You don’t want to be slammed just because of simple miscommunication.
5.  Have a takeaway- Be short and to the point.  Let them know next steps, how they can contact you, and anything else that is relevant.  This applies to all emails in business, but especially with PR.  If you leave things too open ended, they will be ignored.
6.  Provide attached background info (not too large)-  Attach or link to media files, supplemental materials, and more.  Don’t make the email too large, as it becomes overwhelming.  You’re one of 100 on a good day for some blogs.  Get the good vibes going, not the “this sucks” vibes.
7.  Send to the right person- Chris Anderson made this very clear with his PR “Blacklist”.  Tons of PR pros were sending emails to the editor, instead of the right contact at Wired.  Certain bloggers cover certain topics on blogs.  Don’t end up on a blog blacklist, it’s not a pretty place to be.

Some Additional Posts to Read : 

Blogger Relations 201

 Elevator Pitch on PR and Blogging  Bad Pitch Blog PR Wiki-  Tips on Pitching Bloggers Blogger Relations 101 

Wow… this has been a long time coming. The team at Publictivity is beyond excited to have you here for the first time at our Education Blog. We started blogging in late 2006- mid 2007, but stopped in preparation for Beta. We wanted to create something more than just a blog, but a resource that was useful to Public Relations Practitioners, Social Media Enthusiasts, Bloggers, Startups, and more. To keep things simple, we’ve created a list of what the Education Blog IS and IS NOT.What The Publictivity Education Blog IS

• A Resource For Anyone- We made this resource for everyone, not just our first target customers, Public Relations professionals. Whether you are a social media enthusiast, a student, an entrepreneur trying to launch their startup,etc., this blog will provide useful insights.
• One Side Of The Story- This is fact mixed with opinion. To put it simple, it is a lot of interpretation. The great thing about blogging comes in the form of different opinions. Everyone gets to tell their side of the story. Look at TechMeme for example.
• An Open Conversation- Comments will always be open. Period.
• Explaining Why Things Work- This is about why things work. The inner workings and the deep analysis, not a straight forward observation. For example, the community aspect of facebook moreso than the technical or UI aspects of Facebook.

What the Publictivity Education Blog IS NOT

• Purely About Public Relations- right now our focus is on Public Relations, but as entrepreneurs, we have a ton to share. You’ll also gain insights into our company, and issues that we face.
• A Definitive Answer- We’re not the end all source for the topics we talk about. Most of the time we’ll provide supplementary sources, that might even argue against what we say.
• Ego Boosting- We’re not here to sit on our high horses, and tell you what’s right. We want to help contribute to the community with our thoughts.

This is in response to Dan Rua’s Post on Coming Full Circle to Apple. I was originally writing this in the comments, but realized the comment was really better suited to be a blog post.

It’s funny, I grew up on Windows and PCs. My dad got me into DOS and Excel at like 5. I grew up with Bill Gates as my idol and told my teachers in grammar school that Macs were for kids and Windows is what dominates the world. I stopped handwriting any and all assignments in the 4th Grade because of MS Word. I thought Windows, MS, and PCs were unstoppable. Well, that changed. I bought the first iPod ever back in 2001. I was a digital music and MP3 aficionado. I had the Diamond RIO 16 mb player back in 97. Problem was, the first iPod was Mac only. So what did I do? I bought a mac. It was an iBook g3 probably. I barely used the thing. I couldn’t get away from Windows. 3 Years later though, I finally snapped. I couldn’t deal with the Windows experience. My 6 month old toshiba was virus ridden, heavy, breaking, and horrible. Maybe this was coincidence, but about a month before I formed my first Startup, I switched fully to a Powerbook.  Windows was out of my life.  Since then everything I’ve done is influenced by Apple. Publictivity runs on apple machines.  Publictivity was completely coded and designed on an apple.  Even the UI quirks are very apple like.  In short, I am Apple.  I’ll be even more Apple when my sprint contract ends and I grab an iphone.  I do joke about the lack of copy+paste functionality :-P.
To respond to Dan’s post a little bit more though: Yes, the ease of use of Apple, its power for pro apps (coding, design,etc.), with web based apps is the ultimate configuration.  Go for the Mac.  Use Keynote to make a presentation instead of Powerpoint, and youll be sold at the quality of what youre using.

PS- blog overhaul and full alpha materials are coming this week. I promise.
[tags]  apple, microsoft, switching, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]

David Cann, our awesome developer has put together another amazing iPhone app. This time he’s made iChat, a feature everyone wants, but won’t be getting on the 29th… until now.  David’s a good friend, so we took care of hosting the application on our servers (call this stress testing). You can check out David’s application at:

www.publictivity.com/iphonechat/

PS- sorry for the lack of posts.  We’re getting ready for alpha, and waiting to post until then.  Expect that late next week.  Also expect some other very big announcements in the next few weeks.

[tags] iphone, ichat, digg, david cann, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]

Valleywag has the exclusive that Myspace/News Corp is Buying Photobucket.  The price isn’t disclosed.  Now with the events that have been going on, I’m sure this has been one hell of a negotiation by News Corp. Here’s how I think it went aka Mike this is your backstory:

Round One

Photobucket: Hi News Corp, we’d like you to buy us for 300 million.  We’re a big asset to MySpace, you wouldn’t want google owning us

News Corp: you are a big asset, but you only had 6.3 million in revenues.  We’re myspace we don’t need you.  Try half that and we can talk

Photobucket: OMGZ our VCs and Bankers tell us 300 million, watch this.

Round Two

Photobucket To World: We’re for sale for 300 million and we’re making the announcement on Tech Crunch.  Come buy us!

World: Not for that price.

News Corp: Watch this…

Round Three

News Corp: Eat Shit Photobucket, we just hit the off button

Photobucket: Oh shit, now we’re screwed…

World: you’re not worth anything to us now

Round Four

News Corp: Half your price, which is being generous.  If you don’t give in, we’re never turning you back on

Photobucket: Okay, we’re still millionaires.

Yahoo: Oh crap, Flickr still only has minimal marketshare and is overhyped. At least we got rid of Yahoo! photos
[tags] flickr, photobucket, news crop, acquisition, tech crunch, valleywag, publictivity, web 2.0, myspace [/tags]

Our good friends at Scrapblog forwarded this over.  They’re looking for someone who is really in touch with the community and “gets it”:

“Please see this post: http://blog.scrapblog.com/?p=71

Thanks in advance,
-Alex

“
[tags] scrapblog, publictivity, jobs, community, miami startups, web 2.0 [/tags]

“Enterprise is last now. We have 1,500 employees on Facebook because we don’t have the internal tools to provide community,” Scheinman said. “A lot of the enterprise has been behind in adopting all these tools.”

… nuff’ said.

Why am I posting this and what is its relation to us…? In due time my friends
[tags] cisco, publictivity, web 2.0, dan scheinman, social software, enterprise, facebook [/tags]

Okay, so last week was pretty hectic for us. We spent the end of the week and some of the weekend moving everything over to our brand new servers (except our blog, which is still hosted by Media Temple). So what are we running on you ask… a MAMP stack? Wait, there’s a typo there isn’t there? Nope, we’re using Macintosh Apache MySQL and PHP. Let me tell you, it’s pretty awesome. The servers we’re using are:

Dual Core 1.88 GHZ Macintosh minis with 2 GB Ram. We’ve also lightened the load on OS X and done some custom configs. (ie- no iphoto and that junk).

Why are they awesome? They’re cheap enough, easy to swap (I can go to a mac store and within 20 minutes have a new server), energy efficient, and when we really start buying a lot of them we can fit WAY more than 42 of them in a cabinet. Oh, and they run on OS X, which makes administration really cool. Here’s a screen-shot of what everything looks like. The screen shot below is what I see when operating the server remotely… it’s OS X:

So let me explain everything:

1. We’re using Remote Desktop 3 to connect. It’s amazing.
2. CocoaMySQL for database administration. Cocoa MySQL is a grat application
3. FTPd for FTP stuff. David set that up, not sure
4. Textmate for code and config editing
5. Super Duper for backups
6. Safari for checking pages,etc.
7. Terminal, console, etc.
8. We’ve also kept quick access to our config, confd, and ini files.
9. We made it look nice with the Publictivity logo there.

So in short, that’s what we’re using for our servers. Let me know if you try the same.

Expect a new landing page, blog look, and alpha test to come in the next couple of weeks.

[tags] mac mini, mac servers, os x, apple, remote desktop 3, mamp, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]

That’s right folks, we’re moving over to our brand new colocated Apple Servers!  Please be patient with us as the blog, main site, and even *gasp* our emails will be down on and off for the next 72 hours.  If you need anything else please email me personally at jasonlbaptiste [at] gmail.com Thanks! PS- Expect the alpha testing to begin real soon.
-Jason L. Baptiste

CEO of Publictivity

[tags] publictivity, web 2.0, servers, apple [/tags]

404? Weird. More updates coming

Final Update: Youtube is back up.

Update: 4:07 AM EST and it is still down. No word on why yet.

Update: rumor is the Qwest and other servers backbones might be causing it. Question to any geeks: Could the facebook layout change have ANYTHING to do with it? If not, pardon my ignorance.

[tags] youtube, 404, google, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]