While the most recent presidential election seems to have gone some way towards healing the red state/blue state divide, there is another even more yawning chasm that yearns to be bridged in America today. Of course I mean the gulf that exists between public relations professionals and bloggers.

How bad is it out there? Let’s take this story from yesterday which is the flipside of my post last week about how Scott Monty and Ford are rocking social media outreach.  Ford’s cross-town car making rival Chrysler stuck their foot in it big time during the traditional auto industry preview show and tell with industry journalists. This is the time period before the Detroit auto show when the car companies reveal future product plans for the next few years in exchange for honoring an embargo agreement. While GM and Ford were sure to include bloggers Chrysler made it clear that they were not welcome. Stupid move.

Jalopnik, one of the top auto blogs, was so miffed that they contacted some of their mainstream press friends who did go and got the scoop on Chrysler’s plans from them. Since they weren’t invited (and when asked were turned down) they were not subject to the embargo agreement and posted it all. This was then reported by the other big auto blogs like, well, Autoblog, further spreading the embargoed material and the sordid story.

Why would Chrysler PR do something so completely boneheaded? Contempt, plain and simple.  Old school public relations practitioners simply don’t believe bloggers have the same standing as traditional media. The idea of writers who aren’t beholden to an editor or a publishing company, and who don’t necessarily rely (like the car buff magazines do) on ad pages to survive strikes fear into the heart of people who believe that managing coverage requires monetary leverage or the threat of being fired.

Had they listened to Chris Anderson’s talk yesterday they would know that bloggers write for a variety of reasons which can include money, enjoyment, and building their personal brands. Instead they were treated as untrustworthy pariahs.

Bloggers have also done their part to fuel the fire, with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch as Exhibit A.  While he’s right to call out clueless PR flacks who shill to sites regardless of relevance, the blanket statement that TechCrunch will no longer honor embargoes strikes at the heart of exactly what these PR folks fear the most.  Now I’ll grant that sending an embargoed press release to someone via e-mail without knowing what they are going to do with it is kind of dumb but this kind of hyperbolic response won’t stop the spamming and will confuse those on the PR side who really need to be educated. When I worked at Business Wire I used to counsel our clients to approach blogs gingerly and to get to know them rather than sending them information blind the way they might to a newspaper or magazine.

The spamming problem is exacerbated by the fact that many PR folks supplement their own contacts with e-mail lists supplied by third party companies like eNR. Even at the best of times the lists have inaccuracies and may not represent the best way to get in touch. It does allow the PR professional to show their client a longer contact list and feel that they are pushing their news out to a bigger audience more easily.

What would help is for the folks on the PR side of things to look at bloggers as media outlets, media outlets that are vastly different than what they have worked with in the past. The reality is that Arrington’s post notwithstanding, if you invite blogger’s in to a special event (as Ford and GM did) they are very unlikely to abuse that access. Being invited may not necessarily make them more money (though it might) or please a non-existent editor if it’s a one person operation, but it does pay those bloggers in other ways by speaking to what we referenced a few paragraphs ago – why they blog. Being allowed in increases their sense of being accepted as part of the industry they blog about, their status and personal brand rep, and ideally should be fun for them.  They won’t give that up just to break an embargo.

Even better, give bloggers exclusive web-ready content. The folks promoting the movie Watchmen did just that but releasing exclusive posters to specific blogs. Each blog got a different piece of artwork. In this case the blogs were pretty mainstream but imagine the impact on traffic this has had.

For bloggers, be patient with clueless PR folks. They are still learning how it’s done.  Well, many of them are anyway. The ones who are simply rude should be called out for it. This being said, there are plenty who do it right – encourage them to spread their teachings around.

Questions or comments? Follow me on Twiiter @nmallin

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Blogging, Media Convergence, Publishing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.