Darren Barefoot took a deft swipe at the WeblogWire service, which purports to deliver your news release to the eyeballs of a gazillion bloggers at the click of a mouse (and a payment of $49 U.S.).
He wrote a news release that announced his intention to pillory the company in an upcoming blog post, and dutifully ponied up the cash. The release was online for a while, and then silently vanished. (No word yet as to whether the same happened to Darren’s money.)
As he puts it so well,
Really, this is a bad idea. All it teaches PR people is that the Old Ways are Good, and that press releases can now deliver the blogosphere as they have delivered the mainstream media before. Media and blogger relations (and they’re not very different) is all about relationships, [emphasis mine] which tend to cost more in time and effort than fifty bucks.
Here are two additional objections. One, WeblogWire just plain insults the intelligence of their would-be customers with their description of how the service works:
- Submit your news release via our web based system.
- Your press release is distributed to bloggers worldwide using RSS.
- Thousands of new people all over the world will cover your latest news.
Uh, no. Not unless your story is worth talking about. It doesn’t matter how many people are reading that RSS feed; if all they see is yet another news release announcing how your latest corporate reorganization leverages the nimble synergies of first-mover advantage, they wouldn’t cover it if you held a gun to their heads.
In other words, WeblogWire is fixing the wrong problem. It’s not that bloggers aren’t seeing your news; it’s that they don’t give a rat’s ass about it. You want them to cover it? Do as Darren says and build relationships with them… and tell a compelling, relevant story that hits them where they live.
Which brings me to my second objection: what’s in it for a blogger? It’s hard enough to keep track of my feeds from all the blogs written by interesting writers providing worthwhile content; what could ever possess me to subscribe to a feed of news releases, nearly all of which are guaranteed to make me want to gnaw off my mousing arm?
That’s why services like digg.com, del.icio.us and memeorandum are so popular. They provide an opportunity to discover genuinely interesting content without having to sift through the bilge that so often passes for corporate media relations.
Getting your story front and center for a mere $49 would be a bargain if it were possible. But the truth is that blogger engagement is a much more demanding discipline. It requires honesty, time, work and a willingness to listen as well as speak.
The good news is, the effort you invest on all of those fronts can yield the kind of returns that WeblogWire can only dream of.
