By Francis Moran
While we here at in
media have long maintained there is
little difference between bloggers and conventional journalists when it comes to pitching, we do appreciate that many bloggers do not care at all to be pitched by us PR types. That’s not usually an issue for us; as an agency specialising in business-to-business marketing public relations for technology companies, we’re interested only in those bloggers who have real influence in our clients’ markets. These folks are often journalists who have simply moved to this new channel, or
de facto technology news sites, like
engadget or
gizmodo, that welcome properly crafted pitches.
Still, many bloggers are looking for a nice, polite way to tell us PR folk to stay away and Todd Defren is again advocating that bloggers be explicit about their wishes. It’s an approach, as Defren says, worth looking at.
By Danny Sullivan
The majority of smaller tech companies approach dealing with technology analysts in much the same way. That is, brief them on key milestones such as new products, major customer wins and so on, and hope to eventually make the breakthrough into one of the industry reports covering your sector.
This is still a valid approach to dealing with analysts, but there are other ways of addressing them. Beyond being advocates of technologies and observers of trends, analysts are recognised thought leaders in the sectors that they cover. As such, they are always interested in new perspectives and visionary approaches to addressing the challenges in their markets.
Tackling this does not necessarily mean using a briefing to explain in depth how your latest product addresses these challenges – you may be better served by organising a briefing where your company’s top thought leader will simply raise the concept and discuss it in detail in a non-commercial conversation.
Why do this? Well, analysts have to sit through countless briefings and often are rarely engaged more than to silently take in the information being fed to them. By hopefully engaging them in more of a discussion of a concept than a barely altered sales pitch, you may raise your company’s estimation in their eyes, but more importantly, you may bring some influence to the perspective of a key thought leader in your market. Even if you don’t receive direct coverage, your reward may be that your vision sparks debate and commentary at the analyst level… Not a bad return on a conversation.
For more on working with analysts, check out my previous posts titled Analyze This and Analyze This (continued).
