I am feeling kind of bad because I criticized the director of a tech PR agency (I called him clueless) after he wrote this post. I apologized after he wrote a comment saying that I wasn't cool to attack him this way.
After apologizing, I started to think about it. As a blogger, I've worked with a few tech PR agencies to video-interview their clients. Bottom of the story, they are all pretty awful in terms of accompanying the online life of bloggers. Let's start criticizing:
1. First the good thing: they all take the time to personalize the email they send you (bravo there ladies).
2. Creating a video from logistics to final cut and launch takes an awful lot of time (I blog video-interviews). Many PR execs who ask me to do it don't even send a thank you email after I post the video.
3. PR execs never leave comments on the content they encourage you to create.
4. Tech PR execs usually aren't tech-savvy. A lot don't tweet, and some don't know what an embed code is.
5. Tech PR execs sometimes don't understand what reciprocity means online: when I ask for them to mention me in a blog post, it's not just for the fun of working my fame, it's for my Technorati ranking God damn it! (which has been dropping like a Google share in the last few weeks)!
6. Tech PR execs don't track their bloggers in a feed reader to interact with them on a weekly basis.
7. Tech PR execs are usually nice and pretty-looking young ladies. Why? God why? Where's the geek who gets tech?
That's, I think, enough bad talk. Now of course Tech PRs could do the same list about bloggers. And they should do it, as I think that making a list of things that grinds my gear about PR execs helps me be a better one (I'm slowly getting in the business).
Now criticizing is the easy part. What would I do to make things better in the Tech PR industry?
1. Hire bloggers: Bloggers get blogging, and that's important.
2. Do not have xls listings of bloggers, but opml listings.
3. Contiguous to 2, subscribe to your bloggers' feeds and interact with them at least once a week.
4. Share your bloggers' articles on Twitter (the ones you like).
5. Read more tech-related stuff, something that bloggers will naturally do to better their blog performance.
6. The long-tail of blogs is an opportunity, not a pain in the butt.
7. After that, when you will have a story to cover, it will be easy as ABC to know who to talk to, and since who give your bloggers so much on a regular basis, covering your story will be a form of reciprocity for them.
There, I think that's constructive enough. I'd like to say to finish this that I have a really good contact with all the PR pros that get in touch with me. Recently, some have even helped me to become a competitor by sharing some business knowledge (at this point, I am not a threat to anybody). I love them all. They have all helped me get more content for my blog. They just sometimes lack the "tech" part in Tech PR agency.
