Anne Truitt Zelenka

I’ve been following the TechCrunch/Mother’s Click story with fascinated horror. It seems to encapsulate all that is wrong with blogger relations today. Tara nailed it: “for Mother’s Click…wtf are they thinking? Why even target Mike and TC? Huh? The majority of your audience isn’t even there - you want to go to BlogHer and Dooce and individually talk to all of the mommy bloggers you can about giving it a try.”

Todd Defren, who works for the PR company hired by Mother’s Click, tried to dissociate his company from the controversy saying their advice to Mother’s Click was to leave TechCrunch alone, after going through “the right channels” failed to get TechCrunch coverage. More instructive is Todd’s earlier post on blogger relations versus media relations. He identifies three challenges for PR professionals trying to connect with bloggers, but doesn’t offer any ways of overcoming them. Might this be because public relations as currently set up cannot, in any meaningful way, engage with bloggers? Because there’s a fundamental mismatch between the drive for positive spin via mainstream media outlets (public relations) and the drive for authentic expressiveness in microcommunities (blogging)?

As James said, “you can’t conveniently roll up the long tail to suit your management needs.” But you don’t need to. You need instead to engage person to person, developer to technology blogger, mom community organizer to momblogger, directly, without public relations getting in the middle of the relationship. A PR professional doesn’t have the knowledge or bandwidth or purpose necessary to connect with the bloggers who matter.

Todd admitted in an earlier post, “One of my personal fear factors in this 2.0 age is how PR practitioners
can possibly find the time & energy to create, monitor, nurture and/or sever the hundreds of relationships that might (or might not) aid their clients.” It’s not possible for PR practitioners to do that. What’s possible and valuable is for the clients themselves to deeply engage with the community they want to work with, person to person, one at a time. They don’t need PR companies or in-house PR people to do it for them.

UPDATE: Amyloo said a similar thing two weeks ago:

Companies marketing products or services just need to make their own blogs and talk straight. That’s the best way to get started in the blogosphere. I’d say leave the PR firms right out of it. An agency is only a different flavor of intermediation. For that matter, so is your marketing department. Disintermediation is what the wired world of consumers wants.