How PR Companies Choose Bloggers

Ever wonder why some bloggers are chosen for certain PR campaigns and others aren’t? How do Public Relations professionals find the bloggers they tap for certain campaigns? When a PR professional isn’t familiar with the scene, how does she choose which bloggers are a good fit for her client’s outreach?

Alexa is a first stop for many PR professionals, who use it to gauge a site’s traffic, reach, and audience. Corinne Litchfield checks Alexa and sometimes Technorati for info, “but with more niche blogs the data isn’t particularly significant. What’s most important to me is looking at the blog and seeing what’s there and what isn’t.” Litchfield checks the blog’s design for ease of navigation and content, the date of the last post, comments and signs of reader engagement, and for evidence of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

PR Professional Serena Matter goes further, checking social media stats such as how many times the blog post has been shared on Facebook or Tweeted. She then checks the number of subscribers on Google Reader and uses monitoring platform Radian6 to determine the blog’s level of influence. This process establishes an unofficial ranking for blogs Matter is vetting:

I will focus my outreach efforts on the “tier 1” bloggers I have found. Once I have finished outreach to those bloggers – and assuming I still have enough budget leftover – I will proceed with pitching tier 2 and tier 3 bloggers, as time/budget allows.

Steven Le Vine of grapeVine wants to know who else is engaging with a blog. He said, “[I] look around to see who else they have written about; if those people or companies are up to the same level as my client.” For Le Vine, size does matter, depending on the client he is working with:

As some of my clients are more well known than others… I don’t want to offer up celebrity interviews with websites that are not up to par with my client’s image and status level. With other clients, mainly those that we are building out, there is much more flexibility to try a “volume” approach, in that we try to publicize them anywhere that is relevant.

For some PR professionals, controversy or a general negative tone on a blog is a turn off. Others get the impression that bloggers just want free stuff, or the amount of free stuff given outweighs the amount of blog exposure received. In some cases, PR reps are concerned about possible competition from certain bloggers who blog in the same niche as the company, or the risk of unprofessional reporting. Tom Woolf of Woolf Media said:

My challenge with vetting new media is often you aren’t sure of their “day job.” Do they have an ulterior motive or perspective? Just because someone has a blog doesn’t necessarily make them a journalist. (Heck, I maintain my own blog but don’t pretend to be a reporter.) When working with bloggers I have to be careful because I know they don’t always use good journalistic practices, do unbiased reporting, check their sources, etc. (Actually, I heard a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News say once, “If I can get three sources to validate, it goes in the paper. If I can’t get sources to validate, it goes in the blog.”)

Many companies get so many requests from bloggers that they have created a process for weeding out requests. Janna Meyrowitz Turner’s company Style House PR has created a Blogger Consideration Form that they send to bloggers who request product samples for review. The form satisfies the need for research by having the blogger provide relevant statistics, but also serves to separate out those who aren’t serious: “If a blogger can’t bother to take the time to fill it out then how would they take the time to properly review our clients’ product?”

In most cases, PR professionals want to create a continuing relationship with relevant bloggers. Erin Sagester, Public Relations Manager for NASCAR company Eddie Sharp Racing measures a blog campaign’s success by number of impressions, retweets, comments, and further communication. “Basically, I will continually to reach out to the same bloggers that prove that they are excited to have our drivers on and continue to develop creative stories and questions.”