Influx

It appears that PR companies are way ahead of the curve in coming to terms with understanding bloggers as an important audience.

It’s interesting to see what this means for media planners and buyers.

Do they get forgetten about and left to the PR agency to handle?

If it’s about doing more with blogs than running banners, then there’s some potential overlap here.

Ogilvy PR recently took the unusual and important step of issuing a code of ethics that defines how they plan to work with bloggers.

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea> for every social media campaign.
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page
  in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be
  contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might
  be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going
  out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an
  alternate point of contact.
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our
  Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy
  PR agency.
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond
  to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If
  you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

It will be interesting to see what bloggers make of this.

Via Karl at Experience Curve

Posted by Ed Cotton