business 2.0

There have been a ton of mommybloggers in the mainstream media lately, and after wading through post after post discussing these appearances, it occurred to me that not enough people were giving these kinds of appearances enough thought before agreeing to participate them. We don’t really have a manual on how to sort through the email solicitations you start receiving as a blogger once you’ve been doing it long enough to get on the PR firms’ radar, either, and I think some of these people have been capitalizing on the excitement that inevitably results when a media outlet calls, or the first time you receive an offer from a PR firm. Rather than set out a set of prescriptive rules about how to handle these kinds of things — a move that has always struck me as kind of patronizing — I thought I’d share my thinking on different scenarios, and what I think has worked well and what hasn’t worked so well, and then perhaps some of the people who read here who know more about PR than I do can share their expertise in the comments. By the way, while I do get PR solicitations, I do not tend to get media requests, so I am speaking totally hypothetically here: if Anderson Cooper called me up I’d probably be on a plane before he finished saying “mommyblog,” so take my lack of experience with a grain of salt.

1. Say Yes To: Appear In An Expert Capacity, When You Have A Product To Sell.
   
   Ree Drummond recently appeared on The View as a source of cooking ideas, and was able to promote her cookbook. This kind of appearance is a no-brainer: she stands to gain because she has a product readily available to sell, that will appeal to the market she’s addressing, and since she was there in an expert capacity, she was not likely to find herself being prodded with uncomfortable questions or in the middle of any kind of controversy that might be tough to manage. The only reason to say no to this kind of an appearance would be if you don’t have a product to sell, and want to avoid saturating yourself in the media. I think with these kinds of things, you have a certain number of appearances that people will give you, and after that point they start wondering why you’re there, and wishing you would go away — I’m calling it the Gloria Allred factor. Unlike Gloria Alred, who shows up in any possible capacity when a legal “expert” is called for, Ree Drummond has always appeared on mainstream outlets in conjunction with her product, and as a result the audience always is left with wanting more of her, and she always gets a clear advantage by being able to promote her product to more people.
2. Say No To: Settling Fights In The Media. Last week, an uneasy peace was somehow brokered between two warring parties in the comment section of a post here at ABDPBT Personal Finance. Part of what allowed that to happen, I think, was that the two parties had been all ready to film a segment with MSNBC about their feud, and when the segment was canceled, they needed somewhere to go to air their grievances. As it turns out, the cancellation of the segment with MSNBC was a really lucky thing for everybody involved, because if they had been put on TV to do this, it’s almost certain they wouldn’t have been able to reach any kind of agreement, neither party would have looked good or received much of a traffic boost from their appearance, and the feud would have escalated instead of resolved. Both parties, upon reflection, realized this, once they were given a chance to cool off, but the excitement of being chosen for a media story in the mainstream can cloud people’s judgment a lot of times. Even if you think you are the righteous one in a feud, reflect on the fact that it’s in the media’s interest to escalate the fight, rather than to resolve it, and that they are going to give you only a few minutes to state your case anyway. You are going to come out of a media appearance like this looking worse, not better, so it’s better to just say no.
3. Say No To: Pitches That Give You Nothing And Reveal The PR Rep And/Or The Company To Have Bad Character. Last week, I received a PR pitch from somebody who tried to win favor with me by bad mouthing another blogger. Not only was the email formulaic — begin with a general sentence, fill in a space that might as well say [INSERT NAME OF BLOG HERE], and then follow up with a sentence that starts out with the name of one of your posts, the PR person tried to demonstrate familiarity with my blog by saying something about a blogger that he/she thought I didn’t like, I suppose as a means of . . . what? winning my respect? earning my favor? I don’t know. Now, the reason they sent this pitch to me was to get me to promote some kind of event on another website, so I would never have done anything about it anyway, because there’s nothing in it for me. There’s nothing about the product that would appeal to my audience, there’s no money or favor being offered to me, and it’s just a pretty transparent attempt at getting free publicity. But let’s say it was something that I thought ABDPBT readers would care about — do I want to participate with a company that employs a “professional” who makes a habit of bad-mouthing bloggers in PR pitches? Why am I not going to be one of those people at some point? This is just not the kind of person you want in your life, much less your business.
4. Say No To: Generalized Appearances On Mommyblogging, Absent A Product To Sell. Another big media event in the past week was the Today Show segment, “The Dark Side of Mommyblogs,” which featured a taped portion with one blogger and then had two live guests in studio for an interview about the supposed dark side of mommyblogging. The story that the Today Show wanted to tell was clearly about the criticism or negative aspect of mommyblogging, but because the two guests were well-prepped with talking points beforehand, and because they both were absolutely determined not to talk about or even acknowledge any possibly negative aspect to mommyblogging, Ann Curry was not able to get them to say anything negative at all about the community, except for a last-second mention of “trolls,” which Curry jumped all over like a vulture on a dying coyote at the very end of the segment.

   

   Now, even if some community members inexplicably hailed this appearance as an example of “balanced journalism,” what I think is that these bloggers were exceptionally well prepared to tell the story that they wanted to tell, and that the only reason that they were successful was that, it appears, they were smarter than Ann Curry. Kudos to them for getting the story out that they wanted, but I’m still going to venture that the decision to show up on this panel might not have been a good idea — for one thing, it could have gone very differently, if Ann Curry had been better prepared, or if there was somebody on the panel with a different take. Secondly, there was no immediately discernible reason for them to be there: they might have gotten a few more hits on their websites, but neither has a product to sell, and therefore they’ve kind of wasted that appearance in the media, in my opinion. And lastly — this is where I express the unpopular position — though they were successful in telling the story that they wanted to tell, and keeping Ann Curry from telling the story that she wanted to tell, I’m not sure that the segment was a success by anybody’s estimation. It was . . . boring, and vanilla, and probably made people not connected to mommyblogs think about turning off the TV. My thought would be: why be a part of that nonsense? Why do I want to be one of the two boring people on TV? What’s in it for me?

   

   And if you’re thinking that I’m alone in that thinking, reflect that Heather Armstrong was also asked to be a part of that panel, but declined because the Today Show would not give her information about what the panel would concern ahead of time. That’s smart. She is in a position to decide which media appearances she makes and which ones she doesn’t, and I think perhaps we should all just start out from that perspective, rather than go to these things thinking that one day they will lead us there.

5. Say Yes To: Well-Planned Events For Products You Think Your Audience Might Like. I recently agreed to attend an event thrown by a well-respected PR event for a product that I’m not certain is a total match for ABDPBT, but that seems interesting enough that I might find out something to pass on to my audience. I will not be receiving anything in exchange for attending the event itself, but because the product they are pitching is new and might be of interest to a portion of my readership, I decided it’s worth the trek to the West Side to check it out. The value for me is in gathering new material for my readership, and being able to tell them about something I think they would enjoy.

Agree? Disagree? What am I forgetting?

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