How NOT to conduct blogger relations

Online news outlets, like this one, and pretty much any other influential blog out there, are hot commodities for many PR and marketing people. If you’ve got any kind of consistent readership, companies like Matchstick Marketing will want to get you to try out and review products.

Rebecca Bollwitt, hyper-local Vancouver area blogger, Miss604, has been involved with Matchstick Marketing in the past, and even successfully reviewed a Samsung T10 for the company. In addition, she and her husband John had successfully participated in a campaign for a Nokia 6682.

But, it seems that successful campaigns from Matchstick Marketing are few and far between, and they manage to piss off more bloggers than they make happy:

Matchstick Marketing Crosses the Line into Spamming [Darren Barefoot]
The one where we all start pimping for the man [Vancouver Metblogs]
Matchstick.ca is buzz marketing gone wrong [Borris Mann]
I won’t be Nokia’s bitch [Unvarnished]
Match-Stuck [Worldwide Watercooler]
Matchstick, please stop the spam [Vancouver Metblogs]

See, the thing about blogger relations is that if you screw up, you’ll be outed, almost immediately. Citizen journalists are an immediate bunch. We usually don’t sit on things that either piss us off or make us happy very long.

The things Matchstick did wrong include:

• Contacting bloggers several different times, by several different Matchstick employees about the same campaign
• Not responding when the blogger is qualified and agrees to sign up for the campaign
• Making the bloggers go through a detailed screening process only to disqualify the blogger on an unrelated, unmentioned point
• Alienating popular bloggers by telling them that they are unqualified for the campaign they’ve been pitched hard for because they participated successfully in campaigns in recent months, but then still contacting them over and over again to participate in upcoming campaigns

Matchstick Marketing needs to get some things straightened out in the own house first, start their own blog and apologize to the bloggers they’ve pissed off, and they might get some of these people, and their loyal readers, back.

Stay tuned for an entry about how to conduct blogger relations the RIGHT way.

(image source: Newscom.com)