Writing-World - the site for freelance writers

How NOT to use blogs to market your product: the Microplane mistake

This post was originally published on my beauty blog, Hey-Dollface.com, which is where the "incident", for want of a better word, happened. I thought I'd also post it here, though, because it's an excellent example of how NOT to use blog comments to try and market your product: and I guess it's also a good lesson to bloggers to trust your gut instincts and take the time to check out your comments if you think there's something fishy going on. Of all of my sites, Hey-Dollface is the one that gets targeted most by spammers, presumably because it's so product-based, but this was the most blatant example of bad self-promotion I've seen in a while.

NOTE: Although I did contact Microplane asking them for an official comment, and making it clear that I was writing a follow-up about this, to date the only response I've had has been from the person who originally commented on my blog. Needless to say, if the company do get in touch to further clarify the situation, I'll be happy to publish their response.

*  *  *

Sometimes writing for a beauty blog - or any blog, really - can be quite the eye opener. It's amazing what some companies will do to try and promote themselves while dissing their competitors, and today I came across a good example of this, on my post about the Ped Egg.

In my post, I compared the Ped Egg to the Microplane Foot File. I've used both, and liked both products (you can read my review of the Microplane here), and as I noted in my review, the only real difference between the two, for me, is the price, with Microplane the more expensive of the two. I stand by that opinion, and the respective costings are simple fact which anyone can check out for themselves.

Bad PR: The Social Media Stalker

Social media is great. Seriously, isn't social media great? It lets you connect with people you might not otherwise have interacted with, it gives you access to new and sometimes fascinating pieces of information, it provides a bit of light relief, and, yes, it can be a great tool for marketing and PR.

It's that last point I have the problem with.

Or, actually, that's not quite right. I don't have a problem with sites like Facebook and Twitter being used as a PR/marketing took per se. I can see how those sites could be useful to people in those occupations, and actually, I don't really mind people using them to pitch me the occasional story idea. Well, I don't mind too much, anyway. Personally, I tend to use Facebook and Twitter  for the third reason listed above - a little bit of light relief during the working day - but I know not everyone uses them  that way, so it's not a huge deal if PRs want to use those channels to contact me about something.

What I do have a problem with, however, is a certain breed of PR I've come to think of as the Social Media Stalker. I encountered one today, as a matter of fact. In the course of just a couple of hours, this person:

Why so dismissive of the UK, American PRs?

Several times over the past few weeks I've been contacted by US-based PRs who want to know if I'd be interested in reviewing one of their products for our beauty blog, Hey-Dollface.  The PR will generally begin their pitch by telling me what a huge fan they are of the site ("I read it every day!") and how their knowledge of the site has led them to the conclusion that their product will be of interest to my readers.

Now, this is nothing unusual. Product reviews are Dollface's stock-in-trade: they bring more visitors to the site than any other content we publish, and in most cases the products offered for review are relevant to our readers, so of course my answer to this question is normally going to be "Yes, sure, here's the address!"

But there's the rub. Time and time again recently my positive response to these PR approaches has been met with a dismayed, "Oh. You're in the UK. I didn't know that. We can't send the product to the UK. Sorry."

Then I never hear from them again. So much for all the "love your blog, read it every day, huge fan" stuff.

Bad PR: Is it too much to ask that you look at my site before contacting me about it?

This isn't so much an example of "bad" PR as it is "lazy PR" - and 'lazy blogger syndrome" too, if I'm completely honest.

Over the last couple of months, our beauty blog, Hey, Dollface, has been going through a bit of a growth spurt, and this has led to an increasing number of enquiries from PRs, all of whom are keen to have their products featured on the site.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm happy to hear from these people. We're always looking for new products to feature, and I have to say, the beauty PR industry are very on the ball when it comes to dealing with bloggers. They seemed to realise very early on that a mention on a popular blog could really benefit them in terms of selling products, and so they've been much quicker to reach out to bloggers than many other industries.

But they don't always seem to bother to actually look at the blog before sending their enquiry.

Over the last few weeks, I've had innumerable emails from PRs, all asking for the address to send product samples too. I wouldn't mind this either, if it wasn't for the fact that the address is on the blog, under the "About/Contact" section. That's the section they have to go to in order to get my email address, incidentally. Our postal address is above our email address on the page, so these PRs are actually scrolling past the information they need in order to find our email address, which they then use to ask us for our address.

If this only happened once or twice it wouldn't matter, but I seem to have spent a large part of the last two weeks interrupting my work in order to type out my address and, to be perfectly honest, it's getting old.

In order to try and streamline the process, I've taken to just using a stock email (Which contains a link to the 'Contact' page), but I'm still having to take time out to read the PR emails and reply to them. It may sound like a small thing to complain about and, indeed, in the great scheme of things, it is, but the fact is that dealing with email can be a huge time drain, especially for bloggers, who tend to get a huge amount of the stuff.

This week I've also had a lot of very basic questions from PRs which they would have been able to answer from themselves if they'd spent just a few seconds on the site - much less time than it takes to find my email address, send me an email and wait for me to respond.

So, pretty please, PR people: we love you, but is it too much to ask that you take a very quick look at the blog or website you're pitching to before dashing off an email asking for information that's right there in front of you?

Why Journalists Hate PRs (or some of them, anyway)

(Following on from my post about the PR who wanted to force me to only write good reviews of her brand, I thought it might be fun to look at some other examples of the bad PR I've come across. This article was originally published on my personal blog, Forever Amber , where it caused a bit of controversy, with some members of the PR profession choosing to take the post as a rant against ALL PRs. I include it here, then, with the disclaimer that I don't hate ALL PRs - far from it - and this list is purely some examples of some bad PR I'd had to deal with in the space of one week.)

Well, I finished my Huge Project O' Doom, and have been lying in a small ball under the desk, rocking back and forth and muttering to myself ever since. Just the usual, then. xxxxxxxxxx This particular project involves me receiving a couple of hundred press releases from PRs working for house builders across Scotland, which I then have to sift through to find the interesting stuff. This is made difficult by the fact that some PRs? Are crazy. Here are some actual, real-life examples of press releases I received this week:

• Two paragraphs - no header, footer or contact details, just the two paragraphs - extolling the virtues of what sounded like a truly fabulous new development located "on the waterfront". Just which waterfront this was, however, will forever remain a mystery, because whoever wrote the press release didn't bother to include that irrelevant piece of information. It could be Edinburgh, could be Glasgow - hell, it could be Aberdeen, for all I know. Who cares! It's nice! And luxurious! And buying it would be like going on a mystery tour, never knowing where you would end up. Not that anyone could actually buy it, of course - no contact details, remember? Actually, it's a little bit unfair to single out this particular PR here, because it's amazing how many of them do this - send out press releases without mentioning where the development they're trying to promote is actually located. Amazing.
• A press release complete with changes tracked, allowing me to see, in detail, the many redrafts it had gone through before reaching me. Interesting.
  
• A copy of a company's receipt for buying advertising in the paper, complete with their credit card details. Did they want me to publish this, I wonder? Whoops, too late!
  
• An email containing four pictures of houses, with the words "here they are" at the top. Uh-huh, but WHERE are they? What are they? Oh no, let me guess - two words, sounds like "boat"...
  
• Numerous poorly written, almost-illiterate press releases, with such scanty details that I was forced to go to the company's website instead to try and get the information I needed.
  
• A press release about a housing development in Dubai. Purpose of my articles: to discuss new developments in Scotland.
  
• And, finally, at the other end of the scale, two seventeen-page press releases, containing much more detail than anyone could ever wish to know. GOD.

Bad PR # 1: The PR who wants to dictate what you write

I've just had the PR of a well-known UK shoe company send me an angry rant complaining about a very positive blog post I wrote about a pair of their shoes, in which I described the shoe as “lovely”, “classy” and “appealing”, but also mentioned that it was on the expensive side, and that the company in question have been raising their prices over the past year.

It was the last bit they didn't like.

Press Release Writing 101: Always remember to include the name of your company/client

Another "doh!" moment this morning as I opened up my email to find a press release from a company who had gone to great pains to give me a lot of information about a fabulous shoe sale they're currently running. They suggested this would be a good piece for the shoe blog I edit, and they were absolutely right. There was just one problem, though: at no point in their lengthy email did they tell me the name of their company, the URL of their website, or, indeed, any information which would let our readers know how they could go about taking advantage of these great deals.

D'oh!

Luckily in this case I was able to do some very simple detective work and work out the URL of the site from the email address of the sender, but my point is: I shouldn't have to do work out which company someone is sending me a press release about. No matter how fabulous the story is, or how beautifully you've written it, when you're sending out a press release, check and double check to make sure you've included:

WHO
WHAT
WHERE
WHY
HOW
WHEN

Everything else is just detail, and should be considered the icing on the cake.