Being Amber Rhea

At this point, I’ve been to half a dozen social media unconferences, and at almost all of them, there has been much discussion about how/why/if PR and marketing folks should “reach out” to The Bloggers.

Should PR and marketing departments be embracing social media? Of course they should; and fortunately, a lot of them seem to be past the if and focusing on the how. But for some reason, that’s where there seems to be a major roadblock to understanding.

Rather than talking in abstracts and pontificating about concepts, I’ll give you some examples. Here’s an email I received a few days ago:

From: [redacted] <[redacted]@atomicpr.com>
To: amber@tangerinecs.com
Date: Oct 1, 2007
Subject: Meet with Associated Content?

Hi Amber,

I’d like to check your calendar for October 3rd and October 4th for you to meet with Associated Content’s (www.associatedcontent.com) CEO, Geoff Reiss — who previously served as vice president and general manager of Spy Magazine and more recently was an executive producer for ESPN Original Entertainment. We have a bit of recent news, plenty of opinions, and will be making a news announcement in October, which Geoff can preview.

Associated Content is a New York based online publisher and distributor of participatory media. While a lot of companies are leading with the idea of ‘Citizen Journalism’, Associated Content has also attracted a growing number of former, freelance or full time professional journalists, videographers, and voice talent.

Less focused on ‘breaking news’, Associated Content enables everyone to publish their content in any format on any topic and then distributes that content through its website and content partners. Those who contribute to Associated Content’s ad-supported collection of original text, video, audio and images gain exposure and often earn cash for their participation.

Associated Content has 85k content producers across media types, recently received 10 million in funding, and has added new executives with experience at ESPN, Time Warner and Discovery Communications. And in mid- to-late October they will be announcing the launch of the world’s largest assignment desk, which Geoff can give you more detail about if you’re interested.

Additionally, Geoff can speak to the following industry topics:

• Changing dynamics in the publishing industry - good and bad
• Conflict, competitive issues and economic pressures between print, online, bloggers
• Where ‘Crowdsourced news’ makes sense (local / Johnny on the Spot) - and where we need professional journalists (anywhere that requires resources / depth / editors)
• The untapped market for user generated content (e.g. Home Depot’s “Hammer” page)
• Why it’s all additive, not a replacement - the future of media

I’d love to have Geoff meet with you, please let me know if you have a half hour or so next week.

Best,

[redacted]

Here’s another email I received, a few weeks before that: (No redacting of the sender’s name in this one, because he gave me the okay to post it. But I redacted his phone number because it just seemed like the courteous thing to do.)

From: Ben Pianka <ben@thepeeq.com>
To: amber@gapodcastnetwork.com
Date: Aug 10, 2007
Subject: Sex 2.0

Hello Amber!

We find your sex positive initiatives very interesting! I found you while searching social networks for ‘sex positive’ groups.

Do you know of Regina Lynn’s ‘Sex Drive’ on Wired? Her Aug. article, came out today, and described what we envisioned last year.

My partner Ron & I have built a site that seems to resonate with your philosophy….Loudly!

I’m not sure if any of my Amazon editorial team has reached out to connect with you yet. http://www.thepeeq.com/About/ (they should have!)

One of our major goals in crafting this Sex Centric Community vertical niche market website was to make it female friendly. It seems on the internet, users will form around content that is meaningful to them. We want to create that gravity point within our sexual culture for people to be entertained, share, and contribute.

The site just went ‘live’ 2 days ago without fanfare as there still a lot of stuff to do clearing out test items and sample pages, and wiring some of the functionality, etc. We will be pushing out to the public in 30 days.

Amber, as I sense you understand social media, you can see we have a lot of work to do! We have lots of exciting initiatives, PR, etc. we will be executing.

I read some comments you made about escorts online so I thought you might be interested in the as yet unpublished attached article we had commissioned. Does that make us aiding and abetting?

Hope you’re OK with me connecting with you. That’s how it’s supposed to work right! I would like to have a little give and take via email or phone about this genre and our passion for making a difference in our culture.

Cheers,

Ben Pianka

203-[redacted]

p.s. I lived in Hot Lanta many years ago. In Buckhead, Peachtree plaza towers…though I have not been back in 20 years.

Can you tell which is the “good” example and which is the “bad” example?

The first email is off-putting right from the start, as very the first sentence is someone who I don’t know from Adam telling me what to do. No introduction; no explanation of how they found me and why they decided to contact me; no description of why they think I would care about whatever it is they’re talking about. The whole thing reads like a press release with a “conversational” sentence stuck onto each end, and run through a mail merge to achieve that “personal” touch of using my real name (swoon!).

Despite achieving a high score in the game of “How many buzzwords can I pack into one communiqué?”, it’s painfully obvious that the meanings of many of those words haven’t sunk in.

There’s no quicker way to piss off a blogger than to send him or her an unsolicited email that basically says, “Here. Do this. Good blogger, go fetch.” As if bloggers are just sitting around pining for any opportunity to regurgitate sales pitches sent to them from big! important! companies and organizations. Or, to be more blunt: why should I give you free publicity? Who the hell are you?

And another word of advice: you’re not fooling anyone by sticking the person’s name at the beginning. Write to me as one person to another; not as the squeaky-clean public-facing image of The Company to a random name from your spreadsheet.

Now for a complete 180. Instead of prompting my finger to hover over the metaphorical “delete” key right from the get-go, the second email caught my attention in a pleasantly surprising way. It starts out with a compliment (hey, we all like to have our egos stroked a bit) and an explanation of how the writer found me. The writer goes onto explain why he’s contacting me and why he thinks his product would be interesting, relevant, and useful to me. And it doesn’t come off like a sales pitch. (I’m remembering what [I think] Josh Hallett said at BlogSavannah… “People can smell a sell.”)

It’s easy to see the difference in the overall style of each email. The first one, as I already mentioned, reads like a press release: full of search-engine-friendly buzzwords, every phrase carefully chosen, basically a big wank-fest about how great their company is. The second email reads like, well, a personal email. It’s casual and conversational for real, rather than that (pathetically transparent) contrived version of “casual.” It also has some humor in it, which never hurts!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that not everyone has the time to write 100% original, personalized emails to everyone they want to contact. (I sure don’t!) The email I received from Ben Pianka was at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the generic press release-style email. It is possible to achieve the same result of not pissing off the people you’re contacting, without spending hours starting from scratch on every message you write.

For example, for PodCamp Atlanta, I wrote up a generic “template” email, explaining in regular, everyday language why people should attend and/or sponsor PodCamp. Then, depending on who I was sending it to, I changed some of the wording and put in one or two things that were specific to why that person would care about PodCamp. I also made sure to mention in every email how I found the person (e.g., “I saw the post on TechCrunch about [your new product]…”).

I realize that PR and marketing types who are just starting to dip their toes into the waters of social media might read this and decide not to bother trying to connect with bloggers at all. If they don’t get it right, one of those hateful bloggers might post their email and publicly mock it in an online screed! I think, though, if that is someone’s take-away, maybe it would behoove them to reframe the fear of failure as an opportunity for learning. I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s true. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s really not a big deal. What matters is what you do with those mistakes. Do you withdraw your efforts (and thereby leave the door wide open for your competitors?) or do you take the lessons learned and move forward?

Like I said before, the question is no longer if PR and marketing should reach out to bloggers, so there’s no use trying to avoid doing it. Instead, focus on letting go of hiding behind corporate lingo and impersonal mass communication; we’re all just people, after all.