As mentioned previously, I met with a PR company last week and presented to them about blogs and blogging. This particular company are very interested in contacting bloggers and working with them by either sending press releases or getting their feedback on products and services. I told them press releases as such don’t really work but direct contacts would and could benefit both sides. Trouble is that bloggers are grumpy. But that’s only me and a few others, right? Not all of us terrorise PR companies. (Yes they gave me a little shit for that)
So I got thinking that there is no badge (yet) on blogs to spot the ones willing to opt-in to solicitations from PR companies and no real way of doing Google searches for such bloggers. So, with the help of Google Forms (a new Google Spreadsheets feature) I now have a form where Irish bloggers can opt in to receive press releases and products and services to review. Please note to both the PR companies and the bloggers, this is not some kind of pay per post or pay per review agreement.
So if you want to interact with PR firms, fill out the form. It looks like a few PR companies want to come along to the Blog Awards too to meet bloggers which to me is a good thing.
Also don’t forget you can also sign-up if you are interested in doing advertising on your blog.
Excellent! Next you’ll be setting us up a trade union 🙂
It’s a nice idea, but forcing everyone to use statcounter isn’t.
A lot of bloggers use Analytics or something else. It’s not that hard to give a 3rd party access to an Analytics account – in fact it’s very easy.
I have an email address displayed on our blog (but not a mailto: link, obv) if people want to contact us. And people have. Most of them have been nice.
I don’t think sending press releases to bloggers works, unless the blog is a commercial/professional one (like the Gawker Media ones, etc). Contacting them (them meaning me) directly and openly (Hi, I am ___ and I work for ___, would you be interested in ____?) is fine, so long as the contact isn’t so frequent and non-specific that it becomes spam.
need a “business” category on your form I think Damien.
Like the idea though – well done.
keith
@Michele many signed up so far do not know how to use Google analytics. Statcounter seems the simplest for the non-techie people but any stat program would do.
@Matt All depends on the release. Tech press releases probably work the best but most I don’t think will work as bloggers don’t report as much as they commentate.
@keith Changed
@Damien – yes, but the form made Statcounter an obligatory choice.
Nice idea Damien, signed up.