SciFi reaches out to bloggers

Do you like SciFi; ever wanted to get behind the scenes at one of the shows? It’s usually been restricted to those ‘professional’ journalists, even through the genre inspires written outpourings from many more on the web. This year, Scifi Channel reached out to these professional fans and invited them to a two-day tour of shows up in Vancouver.

Susan has a great piece looking at the marketing effort and some key pieces of advice for brands and companies wanting to do something similar.

Sci Fi Channel invited the online editors and bloggers to Vancouver for a two day blitz during which they attended cast panels and toured the sets of Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Atlantis, Eureka and a new show for the coming season, Flash Gordon. The network organized some deals on hotel rooms and provided some meals, but the editors were basically responsible for their own expenses,

She summarises what many bloggers are looking for when it comes to this kind of interaction. This is a great piece of advice; too often I get asked by internal teams and clients about what they have to give the bloggers, what do they have to pay them. This is often complicated by the upper reaches of bloggers who do charge (you do know Perez charges?) when asked to write about something by PR agencies. With their traffic and celebrity, it works as an endorsement and therefore is regarded as paid work. But there are many other bloggers out there, with respectable traffic, who do it for the fun, the information, the getting the exclusive without doing it for the money.

Susan summarises what bloggers are after:

• Give bloggers access to exclusive content and company principals.
• Treat them with respect and treat them the way they want to be treated.
• Feed them material when they need it too.
• Your outreach must be grounded in what they want, not what you want.

As well as multiple stories filed from the reporting side, you can also see what the day was like for the interviewees. Joe Mallozzi posted his own take on the day:

The panel went very well, both Rachel and David offering up some very funny anecdotes – that I won’t go into here, instead allowing you to read all about them when the stories are filed. While Mars, David’s dog, ambled up and around (“Please, God, don’t let this dog sniff my crotch while the cameras are rolling?”), we fielded a bevy of Stargate-related questions.