e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Blogger Relations: Effective But Not Efficient

November 19th, 2008

Speaking about social media at Tuesday’s Media Future Now lunch, Melanie Phung made a great point about blogger relations: she described it as effective but not efficient. That’s an excellent summing-up, since a link in the right blog can be tremendously effective at driving traffic to a story or at driving the public debate, but getting that link can be extremely time-consuming. As we’ve discussed before in more detail, effective blogger outreach usually takes plenty of research and plenty of relationship-building, while the odds of any given pitch message or call yielding a hit are relatively low. The cost of social media marketing is often measured in hours rather than dollars, unless you’re dealing with a vendor (cha-ching!).

– cpd