Yesterday I attended the annual MIMA Summit at the Depot in downtown Minneapolis. Aside from winning an XBox 360 (thank you MIMA!), there were some very interesting breakout sessions on the latest in interactive marketing.

I attended one session about pitching bloggers. With blogs quickly becoming another channel on PR pros’ media lists, learning how to correctly communicate with a blogger is a must.

Actually, the secret to pitching bloggers is not all that dissimilar to pitching journalists – understand who they are, what they’re interested in and, most importantly, what they write about.

If you are serious about gaining coverage by pitching bloggers, you will have to conduct indepth research.

Tips
- Read your target bloggers on a regular basis
- Open up a dialogue by posting comments
- Be honest/Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not

We all know that PR people and journalists do not have the most friendly of relationships. I just read an interesting article on the reasons why reporters do not find PR people particularly endearing.

The reasons included:

1. Too many PR people, too many emails and too many phone calls.
2. Difficult to tell the difference between pitches. Everything is an industry trend!
3. PR people don’t listen (and don’t keep promises about when they will get back to you with a quote etc.)
4. Most of all, journalists hate PR people because they act like car salesmen.

What’s the best thing PR people can do to counter this opinion?
It’s easy – Understand journalists and what they’re really looking for and deliver good quality material on time.

For the full article, see David Maisters’s “What Reporters Hate About PR People.“

At one stage or another, we are all going to experience the loss of a client through no fault of our own. Relationships between companies and their PR agencies are often short lived – it’s the nature of the industry. All it takes is a change in management or a new strategic direction and the PR agency finds that the relationship is being terminated.

PR contracts are also very dependant on the economic climate. When a recession hits, the marketing budget is the first thing to be cut.

While losing a client is always tough, remember, there is always something to be gleaned from every business relationship. Having worked with a client in a particular industry for a year or two, you have developed expert knowledge of that industry, the key media players, competitors and emerging trends.

When parting ways with a client, it is important to take the knowledge you have attained and apply it to your own marketing. Why not look for another client in the same industry? You certainly have the expertise and background to serve another company in that field.

PR agencies must be resilient and part of that is taking a negative and making it into a positive.

I just read an article in this month’s issue of Business 2.0 about blogging being a big revenue generator.

Firstly, there’s the indirect way that blogging contributes to a company’s bottomline. Company executives can build credibility for themselves and their brand by sharing their knowledge and industry insights via a blog. As the blog attracts more readers, more attention is directed to the executive’s company and services.

An example of this is Lee Odden over at TopRank. His Online Marketing Blog receives an average of 1,000 unique visitors per day and the wisdom he shares about the marketing industry serves as credibility for his company’s services. Lee’s blog really has been instrumental in raising his industry profile. Now, Lee gets invited to speak at and “blog” conferences; direct competitors link to his blog posts from their press pages; and many excellent networking opportunities have arisen due to Lee’s growing position in the industry.

Secondly, popular bloggers are in a position to generate thousands of dollars in revenue by selling ad space. Blogging is no longer a next generation concept and just a hobby for would-be writers. Blogging has become big business with real revenue streams from real advertisers. Digital advertising is becoming more attractive than traditional print placements because of the potential that the Internet holds for reaching out to an extremely wide audience.

Social Media is hitting the online marketing space fast. As the concept continues to evolve, more and more marketers will be exploring ways to fully leverage Social Media tactics.

Here are a few tips for Social Media Optimization:

Social Media Press Releases
The Social Media press release offers a fresh new format for communicating news that is more compatible with online marketing.

Characteristics of the Social Media press release include:

• Elimination of PR speak
• Linkable text
• Photos
• MP3 files/Podcasts
• Videos
• Traditional format replaced with:
• Bulleted points
• Link & RSS Feed to purpose-built Del.icio.us page (provides supporting articles, websites, blog posts etc on the topic of the release)
• Pre-approved quotes from executives, analysts, partners and customers
• Links to download articles and whitepapers
• Links to relevant media coverage to-date
• RSS Feed to client’s news releases
• Opportunity to social bookmark the release

The Social Media press release collates all the latest online marketing techniques into one incredibly impactful tactic.

View the layout of a Social Media press release here.

What defines the New Media age?
The emergence of Social Media tools and technologies that will help PR professionals take their campaigns to the next level.

Today, creativity is key to effective public relations and marketing in general. New Media responds to the need for more creative and interactive marketing communications. New Media provides PR pros with a whole new landscape of possibilities.

Scoial Media tools that PR professionals should be investigating and using inlcude:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
RSS allows the syndication of content from one website to another. Users can sign up for RSS feeds on topics that interest them and have the information delivered directly to their computer. Not only is RSS an effective way of disseminating information, but it is also a popular tool used by journalists to collect data for their stories.

For PR professionals, RSS can be an invaluable tool for keeping up-to-date on clients’ target industries, competitors, trends and media coverage.

Blogging
Despite speculation that the blogosphere is killing PR, blogging is here to stay and should be an integral part of your PR strategy.

I’m using blogging as a viral linking tactic to drive traffic to clients’ websites and increase the number of inbound links.

The Web is a diverse place and there are many search engine options. Yet, when we think about ranking well in the search engines, most of us only care about our Google ranking. Is this bias justified?

“Defining Search Engine Relevancy – 2006” compares Google to other leading search engines such as Yahoo! and MSN. This is how Google compares:

• Google is much better than any other search engine at recognizing whether a link is a true editorial citation or an artifical link. Yahoo! is better than MSN at this, but no where near as good as Google.
• Google looks for natural link growth over time as opposed to “off topic” reciprocal links, which still work in Yahoo and MSN.
• Google favors informational websites. Yahoo’s internal content and paid inclusion program give bias towards commercial search results.
• Google has aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content.
• Google is much more efficient at crawling websites than Yahoo and MSN.

The conclusion?
From a credibility standpoint, Google is a much more sophisticated search engine and the nation’s number one choice when searching online.

However, it is important to remember that ranking well across all search engines will ultimately drive more traffic to your website and generate more leads.

I always knew that there were some strange things for sale on eBay, but I never imagined auctioning off press release distribution.

PRNewswire recently put up an “Off-Peak Press Release with SEO” for auction. The item was sold for $51.00, a great deal less than the service would normally cost.

A very interesting move on PRNewswire’s part and definitely effective from a marketing standpoint. It highlights the point that I have often made – today’s marketers must be innovative and think outside the box.

Bidding has now closed but you can view the sold item on eBay right here.

Just recently, there has been a surge in the amount of interactive online activity. Companies are increasingly looking to augment their customers’ online experience with added features, capabilities and ease of use.

Fifteen years ago, would we have ever imagined that we would be soon banking, ordering our groceries and partaking in video conferences – all via the Internet?

The more interactive the Internet becomes, the more the consumer demands and expects websites to offer the latest up-and-coming features. I , personally, possess that kind of mindset. If I go to a large website, I am annoyed if there isn’t a “search” box. If I am looking for something in particular, the “search” feature makes my task so much easier.

All of these interactive features demonstrate a growing consumer need for instant answers. Because of the Internet, information is now available at our fingertips and interactive websites are taking this one step further – data on demand as quickly as possible.

Isn’t that human nature? The more you give, the more we want.

I never thought I’d get a client coverage on Fox 9 News and not know about it!

Pitching TV stations is usually something that requires a lot of sweat and blood and little to show for it. However, I was pleasantly surprised last week when a client called me in a state of excitement to tell me that he had heard from another colleague that their company had been mentioned on the morning news.

Now, this was news to me. Yes, it was the piece of news I had been pitchiing that week but, no, I had not pitched Fox at all.

It turns out that my contact at the Business Journal had passed on the information to a fellow Business Journal reporter that happened to have a slot on the Fox 9 morning news.

Maybe the back door is the right place to go when looking to get on TV. Build relationships with local reporters and take advantage of their connections with TV stations.