How PR agencies select bloggers to give them free stuff #pr secret

At SocialMediaCamp ’08 I participated in a session between PR companies and bloggers and how they could find a better way to work together. The only problem was that it was mostly people the agencies participating with bloggers at the other sessions.

This didn’t stop the group from exchanging a few tips on how they deal with blogger selection internally. Here is an abstract from my notes.

One of the questions was how do you select bloggers? What is your criteria?

The answer was a bit like expected. They’re looking for influencers, people who have others reading them. This can be seen through different means, like their Technorati rank, Google page rank or even as simple as number of comments they get on their blog posts.

They’re also looking at frequencies of postings as well as their tenure. A well established blog with lots of regular blog posts, will more likely get their attention as something completly new, but with a cachier design.

One of the neater tricks they use, to figure out if they should approach a blogger is to take a look if they carry advertisting. Even though they’re not paying him or her, they seem better choice as they’re open to more commercial concepts around blogs and they’ll more likely take the proposition more seriously.

Lastly, it’s all about relationship. It’s easy to get a chance to talk about some PR campaign and showing that you can carry a good conversation about it with your readers is what matters the most. This will make your chance to get on PR lists much more likely, as will actually publishing your email address on a page.

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