Some Free Advice for Guerilla Marketing and PR

I started reading John Scalzi’s Whatever blog a few months ago when I came across it while researching a post I did about the anti-contraception movement. I put him in my RSS reader because I liked his attitude, and boy am I ever glad I did.

Today, he hit me with a killer example of how NOT to communicate with a blogger by comparing two pitches he received this week–one good, one bad.

The good pitch came from Tower Records that made him a nice offer where the value-add for both sides was clear:

I work for Tower.com and was wondering if you’d be interested in working with us to save your readers a couple bucks.

By contrast the pitch from Guerilla Marketing and PR, was condescending, sleazy and full of marketing jargon:

Napster is willing to pay you money, and all you have to do is keep your site lookin’ pretty…Give us a call or email and say, “my site wants a sugar daddy”, we’ll hook you up.

If you send something like that to a blogger, please don’t be surprised if it gets plastered all over the Web and makes your company look idiotic. It still amazes me when people think that they can put a “hip” spin on a tired old pitch and send it off into the blogosphere. Yeah, blogging is a hip new medium - but the people doing the blogging are still human beings. We want to be recognized as such.

Instead of worrying about looking hip, develop relationships with individual bloggers based on what you have in common. Make deals with them in a human, common sense, low-key way. Nine times out of ten, you’ll get a lot further.

So what’s Guerilla PR and Marketing to do now that they’ve been outed as ineffective in the blogosphere? I’ll give you folks a free bit of advice:

• Send Scalzi - and every other blogger that obvious form letter went out to - an apology.
• Admit that you don’t know what the heck you’re doing.
• Ask Scalzi to give you some pointers about how you might restructure your letter next time and ask him if he might be willing to post the conversation.
• Start sending out better pitch letters.

It’s not too late, Guerilla. You can still turn this around before it becomes a flustercluck of epic proportions. Stop doing things that make your clients look like “a coked-out middle-aged dotcom jackass with hair plugs, hanging out at a strip club and trying to convince the new meat on the stage to do the squishy with him in the back of his C-class Mercedes” and the blogosphere will forgive.

::Sigh:: I love John Scalzi….