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Blogger Survey Result #2: Send The Right Person To Make Contact With The Right Content

July 8, 2008 – 4:53 pm | by Daryl Tay

Yesterday I tackled how bloggers are open to company contact, and knowing that, today I’ll explore what the research says about who should contact the bloggers, and with what content.

Fig 5: Who should contact the blogger?

There seems to be a preference for the PR person, though the score for the company executive scores just over 50% which isn’t bad in my books. I personally have no explanation for this difference. I’m not entirely sure bloggers can tell between a PR rep, comms rep and company executive in the first place. What I like about the findings here is the verbatim quotes on the right, particularly “what they talk about should be relevant to my blog” (sounds like something I would say), “Prefer to talk with active bloggers or those prominent in the blogger community“.

This tells me three things:

1) Please be relevant

2) For people looking to be hired by a PR firm or in-house communications department, your network can be a huge asset. If you’re a well-known, well-liked person in the blogger community, people are going to listen.

3) Companies who don’t have this well-known, well-liked blogger in their office, it’s time to start a blog and become one

Fig 2: Should there be prior contact?

From Fig 2, we see that 78% of the respondents prefer initial contact to be made before shoving a press release down their throats. 78% across all respondents and countries suggest it to be pretty significant, so I’d pay attention to this. What should the initial contact comprise of? Show us you read our blog with responses to our blog posts (Fig 3)

Fig 3: What content appeals?

I find for me, if someone sends me a message demonstrating he/she has read what I’ve blogged about, even if he/she disagrees, I’m more likely to be receptive to the message. Research is not Googling “social media” and emailing the top 10 searches, it’s reading their blogs too.

Note that “corporate news announcements” scores the lowest by quite a wide margin. Simply put? Bloggers don’t want to hear about your quarterly earnings or the usual stuff we can read in the papers. Give us something with a story, something to be excited about, like a new product.

If you’ve made it that far, knowing bloggers invite company contact, and you’ve sent the right representative and made contact in the right way, what should you send them that’s related to you? The response seems to be overwhelmingly video (Fig 4)

Fig 4: What content appeals to bloggers

It’s no coincidence that in my first post, I chose to upload the four videos supplied to me as a primer to the research results. Video is fairly painless to upload (unless you’re using Wordpress) and very easy to view. A word of caution: if you are going to use video, please use one that doesn’t insult the intelligence of the blogger and his readers.

Tomorrow: Should you bother with a social media release and some blogger comments

Tags: bloggers open to company contact, relevant materials for bloggers, what content to contact bloggers with, who should contact bloggers