The Ladybird Version Of Blogger PR

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Jaysus it’s bright out.

Is that the Sun?

Holy feck.

Lads, I got home alive after Mulley’s blogger/PR collision last night. Yes, the troublemakers all sat at the back of the room, including me.

I had no idea what to expect, to be honest. Went with two heads on – my media/radio one where I’ve interacted with them for the last 15 years and my blogger one where I’ve only ever been approached my a PR-type once, which I thought gave me an interesting perspective on it all (and made me feel a bit like Worzel Gummidge at the same time).

A PR guy spoke, Lexi did a great job as our collective mouthpiece and then all chat broke loose…

See, PR wants to know how to get bloggers to talk about their shit. They’re used to dealing with journalists and media kinds who do that for a living, one of the parts of which is dealing with PR-types. It’s a paying job for journos, thus they have to deal with PR.

They’ve taken this model and started it with us (blogger head on). But see, we do this because we like it, are passionate about it. We’re amateurs. And thus we don’t have to deal with PR if we don’t want to.

When someone adds me to a mailing list in work it’s just part of the job, when they add a blogger’s personal mail address to one, it’s spam. It was suggested that they send individual mails to people about stuff, personalised, based on them having actually read the blog they’re writing to.

The PR people said that, in all fairness, they don’t have the time to do that (they don’t even do it for national media) as they have numerous clients to work on and limited time.

I came up with a radical(!) solution at one point.

“Lads, just invite us to things.

Launches and the like. Nights out. When you’re bringing out new console games etc.

It won’t take you much to put 20 or 30 extra invites in envelopes (or names on a cc list) and sure we might go to the launch of x festival or y sports car or whatever and blog about it after.

Ya know. We like going places and looking at stuff and talking about it.”

It’s what we do (to rob a title) 🙂

Above is a very short version of over and hour and a half all spent in the same room, I’m sure others will relay events much more coherently. Fair play to the PR people who did turn up, they’re forward thinking and ten steps ahead of the pack.

Later, we all adjourned to the legendary O’Donoghues as there are few finer places to sup. Got a bit blurry after that.

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I was one of the last to leave, as usual.

8 thoughts on “The Ladybird Version Of Blogger PR

  1. funny i can pick you out of a crowd now and i’ve not ever met you – body language 🙂

    btw, be sure to feel special for the rest of today. i was up at freaking 7am to listen to you this morning – why? i dunno just seemed like the thing to do 🙂

  2. I’ve commented this on Alexia’s and I will post on mine eventually..
    Bloggers aren’t after freebies (don’t hurt). As a group we’re after information so we can blog about it.
    Invite to a gig is great, invite to talk to the performers, better. Even the local back-up acts would be of interest.

    Right?

  3. @donna, you mean behind the camera? 🙂

    @Ben Eh…. Yeah…. Sure…. Dude, no. I’m SO sorry.

    @Will Very much so – the point I was making was that bland, empty group press releases are of no use to us. Ask us along to something where we can wander round, poke into stuff and talk to people and we’re happy as Larries.

  4. LOL rick i thought that was you in the stripey shirt on the left at the back of the room. see what happens to the brain when its up too early?

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