How PR people can help bloggers get good copy for blogging

I‘ve come to know PR people of late as the folks who send me emails asking me to blog about books, services, conferences, websites, and products produced by companies the PR agency represents. Often what’s being pitched has little to do with me or what I blog about. It’s basically spam. And I get about 15 or 20 of these emails a day.

But Erik Sebellin-Ross, a senior account executive with Peppercom Strategic Communication, offers some advice on what PR people can do for bloggers.

A big part of our job is to provide information, so, if you have questions about a company, product, or service, PR people can help you get the answers. If you want to speak with an executive, engineer, designer, or other employee, we can help you there, too – we even book meetings. If you want to review a product, or try out a service, you guessed it: we can help with this, too.

The best and fastest way to find a PR contact is to go to the website of a company you’re interested in and find their press or media page. This is regularly found under the ‘About Us’ or ‘Contact Us’ pages. Another alternative is to look for a press release – we almost always list our contact information on these.

One caveat of Erik’s is to be reasonable in what we expect.

…[A]s much as we’d like to work with every single publication and blog, regardless of size, we realistically cannot. When you contact us, we’ll sometimes ask you to tell us about who reads your blog, what kind of traffic you get, and what you want to write about so we can decide if we can devote time to you. If you’re turned down because you’re too small, consider banding together with a group of similar bloggers and approach the PR person as a unified group to increase your value.

I have emailed communications people with multi-national corporations and major law firms and received helpful responses. Responses that I then blogged as any reporter would.

Last year, I emailed the PR folks at Chubb Insurance asking them to respond to Chubb’s denial of malpractice coverage for law firms publishing blogs. Two days later, I received a press release directly on point from Chubb’s Public Relations Specialist. This when a reporter at the National Law Journal couldn’t get Chubb to respond to their request on the same issue.

Erik does acknowledge the spam like scenario I opened with.

…[S]ometimes PR professionals (fresh-faced interns and grizzled veterans alike) make honest mistakes. Or, worse, don’t do their homework. They build lists of targets without ensuring that every single target is perfect, and they blast out an email using the blind carbon copy feature…and suffer the consequences. Of which there are rarely any – unless we’ve pitched ValleyWag. In the process, of course, we basically spam you and ensure you hate seeing our names appear in your inbox. If it is the former, we truly are sorry. If it is the latter, I’m even more sorry.

But maybe from now on, I’ll do what Erik says – to take a moment to look beyond the PR person’s email. Maybe the PR person can help me get more information about something I could blog about.