A lesson in how not to approach bloggers

There’s a perceptible desire for companies looking for publicity to approach bloggers. It’s been there for a while but I’ve noticed a rise of late. Sometimes they get it right but quite often they get it wrong. Here’s a real world example from the last week.

Recently BRMB, a local radio station, has been emailing bloggers in the Birmingham area about their new motoring website. I know this not because they emailed me but because every so often someone I follow on Twitter would mention it. Chris got one, so did Jez and Nick and Anthony. Rich even went as far as to blog about it. Like I said, I hadn’t been graced with the attention so after I expressed my mock outrage at this snub Nick forwarded it to me. Here’s the document in question.

Hi,

Hope all is well,

After coming across your Birmingham based blog I was wondering if you would consider writing a piece for BRMB Radio. BRMB has just launched a new motoring classifieds site, an alternative to Auto Trader called brmbmotors.co.uk.

This is becoming hugely success within the West Midlands area as it really has a local feel.

We would really like your support with this new service.

www.brmbmotors.co.uk

I’ll look forward to your reply.

Kind Regards

Ben O’Brien

In itself a pretty innocuous email, the sort of polite but unsolicited thing we all get every day, so why did it spark a conversation across Twitter?

The first reason is bloggers tend not to have the same motivations as people who traditionally write copy for publication. The latter will see themselves as part of a process, gathering together information to fill specific sections of their magazine. Someone writing the motoring section of, say, the Metro newspaper would, if they were so inclined, welcome this approach from Ben and, I hasten to add, there’s nothing wrong with that. Bloggers, on the other hand, tend to write about stuff they want to write about. Or at least the bloggers Ben was approaching do. They might all be writing from and occasionally about Birmingham but they do so through their own personal filter. So when you approach them with something that is way out of their area of interest eyebrows will be raised.

But that’s not what’s interesting about this. People function like this all the time and the only reason it’s noteworthy is that these bloggers are publishing but don’t fit in with the process. Beyond that there’s something else going on, and in this case it happened on Twitter.

Blogging is a community activity. While each blogger is an autonomous agent acting on his or her own they do tend to cluster into groups, sometimes formally but often ambiently through association. And they don’t just do so though their blogs. When you start using social media tools like Twitter, Delicious and others you tap into networks and information starts coming to you, information that is often surprisingly relevant. And so because I’m interested in uses of social media tools I tend to see interesting examples of that emerging on my networks (along with other things I’m interested in, before you think I eat, sleep and dream this stuff). I didn’t go out of my way to find people who would give me this stuff – I just started following people I knew or thought looked interesting and let the conversational serendipity engine do its work.

So Ben fires off his emails to what he presumably assumes are a bunch of individual people, little knowing that we’re all talking to each other just as you would in a pub about something mildly amusing that happened at work. Somebody feels the need to share that they got a badly targeted email from BRMB and a bunch of others chime in saying they got the same email and Ben becomes the but of a joke. Look at the silly PR guy. He just doesn’t get it, does he.

Is this unfair? Are we being childish? Well, yes. But then we’re a community of human beings and when you get a bunch of people who have bonded over something, no matter how innocuous, they will occasionally behave like arseholes, ganging up on the outsider who wants to join the party but just doesn’t know the rules. It’s not a good thing and I wish it didn’t have to be this way but I’ve seen it happen so many times that I’ve come to accept it as a fact of life. This is social media. It reflects society and while that makes it exciting and vibrant and real it’s not always pretty.

So what should Ben have done if he wants to get bloggers blogging about his shiny new thing? Well, for a start he could tell the truth. I was curious as to how this brand new site had managed to get 4,268 cars within 20 miles of my house. Checking the BRMB Motors Terms and Conditions page reveals it to be “owned and managed by adflyer.co.uk. All information supplied on the Website is managed by adflyer.co.uk.” Adflyer is a national online classifieds site whose submissions system is remarkably similar to the BRMB one, leading me to suspect that they’ve just done a deal with BRMB to use their branding in return for some advertising space on the radio. While a sensible move and one I’d approve of this does not mean the site “has a local feel” and it certainly doesn’t differentiate it from AutoTrader (who, I note, have 25,046 cars for sale within 20 miles of my house, if we’re counting.)

But truth aside, and I grant you that’s not really a big lie, what Ben should really have done is research exactly who he was emailing. Has the blogger ever written about second hand cars before? Do they, for example, document their activities in the garage? Have the done tutorials about finding spare parts online? Do they even care about cars? I’m not being facetious here. For all I know there is a massive network of bloggers who write about second hand cars. I have no idea who they are as I have no interest in that stuff whatsoever, but I’ll give you a clue. You won’t find them by looking for those who blog about Birmingham because they’ll be blogging about cars.

And then lets say Ben did find a rich seam of second hand car bloggers. How should he approach them without becoming a laughing stock on whatever medium they’re conversing through? I’ve given this a bit of thought and, as it stands, I don’t have any advice for him because BRMB Motors is a vastly uninteresting site. Sure, it does the job if you’re looking for a second hand car but so does AutoTrader. What could I, the second hand car obsessed blogger, find to write about it? “It’s a classifieds site that’s a bit like AutoTrader only with less cars and a link to a radio station.”

And that’s the big lesson here. If you’re going to approach people who publish in the social media realm, be they bloggers or whatever, you’ve got to give them something to talk about. If you don’t then they’ll find something else to talk about. Maybe they’ll talk about how you contacted them but didn’t give them anything to talk about. Or that you contacted their friends. Maybe they’ll blog about that on their blog, like I just did.

Well, at least they got a link out of it. That’s got to be good for something.