There are many important differences between pitching tradional media and bloggers. As I mentioned in my post Influencers Gone Wild, many bloggers have hidden agendas:
A danger in treating bloggers as just another breed of media or analyst misses the point that many have inherent conflicts of interest. For starters, most have day jobs since blogging pays the way for a rare few. Some consult, start companies, and take stakes in ventures related to the fields they blog about.
Most bloggers are not professional journalists. Those journalists who do blog are not necessarily constrained by editorial guidelines. It is hard to know where allegiances lie; and bloggers may well care less about the news of the day, depending on the focus of the blog in question.
A journalist who also blogs for her publication (a major online site geared towards marketers) came in recently and did a seminar for Fusion PR, the agency I work for, on blogging and pitching bloggers.
She said that another important difference is that bloggers prefer to come up with their own story lines, and not get recommendations on angles. They apparently want “just the facts.”
As I am writing this I am trying to reconcile the advice with my own experiences in pitching bloggers, and am wondering if it holds water or is too general a statement. It would be great to hear about the experiences of others.
If it turns out that this true it would provide important validation for social media releases, which aim to serve up just the facts of news in a social media optimized format.
