Guy Kawasaki’s post “How To Suck Up To A Blogger” offers some good advise to PR flacks.
Blogging has flipped traditional PR on its head. It used to be that ink begat buzz. Life was simple then: you sucked up to the Wall Street Journal, one of its reporters wrote about your product, and the buzz began.
Nowadays buzz begets ink. Journalists no longer anticipate or create buzz–rather, they react to it.
Guy lays out a nine point plan for acquiring this highly desired buzz. His seventh point is one I fully endorse.
7. Use a rifle, not a shotgun. Any company that carpet bombs bloggers should be shot. The effect is the same as sending two dozen people the same email requesting help. Not only will this approach fail, bloggers will conclude that you’re a bozo to boot. Your job is to find out exactly who you are relevant to. It is not the blogging community’s job to sort through your bull secretion.
[UPDATE] Guy also mentions it can’t hurt to send bloggers some schwag, which is precisely what Josh Hallet received from Potato Finger, Decatur, Georgia’s purveyor of “old school thin & crispy potato chips.”