Gary Andrews

A full banquet’s worth of thought from Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0:

“The web is the most disruptive force in the history of media, by many orders of magnitude, destroying every assumption on which traditional media businesses are based.

But the market should care, you say. What would happen if we didn’t have the newspapers playing their Fourth Estate watch dog role?

Here’s the bitter truth — the feared loss of civic value is not the basis for a BUSINESS.

The problem with the newspaper industry, as with the music industry before it, is the sense of ENTITLEMENT. What we do is valuable. Therefore we have the right to make money.

Nobody has the right to a business model.

Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.”

People would miss their local paper. But not enough to get outraged and march down the street in protest, I think.

And the death of the local paper, or radio station, won’t mean the death of journalism. It’ll mean that journalism is done somewhere else, probably by somebody else:

“Journalism will find a way. Even if the industries that once supported it do not.”

There’s nothing wrong with trying to retain the audience you’ve got. But retention is fire-fighting. Innovation can start fires elsewhere.

Let’s think about what the staples of the local paper are:

Classifieds? Not any more. Gumtree, eBay, Craigslist and others. Your mates no longer send in embarrassing photos to the paper on your birthday. They stick it up on Facebook.

Letters to the editor? Blogging. Or comments on other blogs.

TV listings? Plenty of those around elsewhere.

Event listings? As above. Google’s as much a friend for this as any other site.

Local sport? Ok, so they’ve got the access. But every club has their official website. Most fans forums post their own thoughts and match reports. The information’s fairly readily available.

Obits? Ok, I’ll give you that one. Nobody does obits quite like a newspaper.

So we just come down to journalism and the quality of the writing (and obits). As nice as it would be to say these are a great reason to keep a paper alive, it doesn’t necessarily stack up for the balance sheet.

Joanna Geary (who flagged up Scott’s piece) has a succinct thought on this:

“If time is becoming increasingly squeezed then I suspect the reasons behind someone dedicating half-an-hour of their time to reading a newspaper have to be even more compelling. Being on public transport and having a paper available for free is one of those reasons.

Even if the newspaper is a great product, with fantastic stories, it may not be something that fits into a person’s life easily.”

The model changed a long time ago, largely thanks to Google [1]. People don’t need to be told what the news is. They can sit at a computer and find out for themselves the news that’s relevant to them (and this is coming from somebody who still loves flicking through the papers and finding random articles of stuff I never knew about. But then isn’t that what StumbleUpon is for?).

And PR: don’t think you’re immune from this. The conversation’s happening around you, not necessarily with you. The web doesn’t need press officers to kick-start and control the conversation. Its perfectly capable of doing that for itself. The question is now how to get into that conversation, not how to control it.

And, strangely, after all that, I still feel optimistic for the future of the media: both journalism and PR. But just not in their current guises. Especially not local journalism if it carries on in its current state. Sorry.

[1] If newspaper editors want to start pointing fingers at websites that are killing their industry, they’d be better off looking there than the BBC’s plans for local news.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Google, journalism as a business, local journalism, markets

The embargo is a strange beast. In essence, a contract between public relations people and journalists that says: “Here’s the information for [what we think is] a great news story. But we’ve set [an often arbitrary] time delay for publishing this story and if you break it we’ll get angry.”

Ok, so the above does a bit of a disservice to the embargo, but in this internet-centric world where any news organisation or website or blogger can, and often does, break the embargo, perhaps a rethink to the humble STRICTLY EMBARGOED UNTIL 00.01 WEDNESDAY line is necessary.

The embargo today still feels like a very traditional media concept (albeit one that still has a time and place) that, like smoking, is a hard habit to give up. Ostensibly, it still feels wedded to the pre-internet days and specifically tailored around print deadlines.

The journalists I’ve met and worked with have mixed feelings towards embargoes. One old tutor from my training days positively encouraged the breaking of embargoes, while another editor was fairly respectful of them as they believed that, in the long run, you’d get some good stories first from the PR as they knew you could be trusted.

Ultimately, though, embargo breaking leads to a weird situation. The press office are likely to get annoyed and, in the worst case, stop working with the media organisation for a period of time. But if the company really wants to work with said media organisation, there’s little option but to start building up that relationship again.

But with the internet, it’s never been easier to break an embargo. Hell, the material can make it from email account to the web in around 10 minutes if the journalist is so minded and feels there’s worth in doing so.

And with no real evidence, other than increasingly common conversations with other PR people about embargo-breaking online, the gut feeling is that journalists and bloggers are increasingly disregarding the stern words at the top of the press release.

Now – admittedly basing this assumption on anecdotal evidence and then declaring it thus – if that is the case, the embargo needs a bit of a rethink.

Should we go as far to scrap the idea of the embargo [1]? Perhaps not completely. After all, the point of the embargo is, from a publicity point of view, to retain an element of control to the story. There are perhaps a couple of advantages to embargoing information:

• Timing the embargoed information to coincide with something else – perhaps even to take the attention away from elsewhere.
• Preparation time for journalists. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to give the media time to digest what they’ve read and produce something relevant for their audience, and this can actually enhance the coverage.
• Co-ordinating an announcement that makes the nation’s collective jaw drop. But, again, how easy is this in an online world?
• Giving the embargoed material to a few trusted places so the announcement can be coordinated strategically.

But even with these (rather vague) exceptions, there’s still an argument for doing away with the embargo. If you’ve got a jaw-dropping announcement, the chances are the collective journalism jaw will also drop, so why not just announce it there and then? More control, less chance of an early leak online.

And if the news isn’t going to get jaws dropping, then perhaps that negates the very need for an embargo. Chances are that if you send it out in the middle of the day, it’ll get filed in the ‘to do’ file, then make the papers the next day.

And if it’s one of those wonderfully pointless surveys that flood into newsrooms on a regular basis with a stat that 76.2% of households in the South East would continue to use canned fruit in the event of a nuclear holocaust, an that tend to end up as space-filling churn, then may I humbly suggest that this news isn’t so exciting that it needs to be sat on until a certain time. The world will, you suspect, keep turning.

But if you’re still wedded to the idea of the embargo or want to give the journalist time to prepare, if there any way the embargo can work in a Web 2.0 environment.

The short answer is probably not. But the longer answer includes a maybe. The most draconian and time-heavy solution would be to lock the material behind a password protected area and include further password protection and lockdowns behind this to make it as hard as possibly the get the info out. This seems slightly too much effort on the part of the PR and irritation on the part of the journalist. Can’t quite see a future for it myself.

The second idea goes back to one of the bullet points  - working with a few specific, trusted outlets – perhaps a couple of leading websites or a paper – and offering the information as an exclusive.

Again, it’s not without its problems or dangers. The information better be good – good enough for organisation A wanting to have it, even under embargo, in the first place, and good enough for everywhere else to want to republish and not get annoyed that they weren’t first in the queue.

In some respects, this is an approach that could find more success with bloggers than traditional media. Web 2.0 loves to share and if the right blogs are targeted, then there’s the potential for a bit of a buzz.

But, again, the story has to be good enough to create a buzz in the first place. And it’s not something I’d be especially fond of doing more than once in a blue moon. Web 2.0 loves linking and sharing, but doesn’t like the feeling of being manipulated, which, done wrongly, this could be viewed as.

Is there a place for embargoes? Do we need them anymore? Could we work a more social media solution in via Social Media Press Releases? Or even wikis? Or is this just a pointless attempt to preserve something not needed? And do you have any thoughts on this that are more coherent than the above? I’ll now throw this to the floor…

[1] Is the embargo dead? Oh, the irony, THE irony!

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Embargo, embargoed information, Social Media Press Release

Qwitter’s launch last week seems to have thrown the Twittersphere (God, what a horrible world) temporarily, as plenty of the site’s users suddenly find themselves in a bit of an etiquette dilemma.

Basically, Qwitter’s an application that sends you a quick email whenever anybody unfollows you, along with your last Tweet. Kind of like one of those ridiculous exit interviews companies insist on putting you through. Or the kind of social media tool that neurotic recent singletons, who pour over every minute of a a failed relationship, would love.

So far, so pointless. But if there’s on thing the internet doesn’t need, it’s a rather useless service that feeds insecurities of online friendships. God alone knows we have enough problem with that offline, and Louis Gray has a pretty good analysis of Qwitter:

“What Qwitter has done with this unnecessary “service” (and I use that term loosely) is turn a very mundane, passive act that usually reflects more on a person’s available time than a follower’s actions into an act of aggression with some seemingly dubious “reason” behind it. I can see this turning ugly, as friends who discover that friends sometimes unfollow them take it personally. This means instead of realizing that on Twitter you can go back and forth with a kind of ebb and flow as needed, those with hurt feelings from being unfollowed proceed to email demanding logic, reasons, and possibly even threatening retaliation or repercussions. Qwitter feeds insecurity and neuroses by making something simple into some kind of seeming failure or insult.

…

The thing about the internet is that it has a tendency to turn aggressive in a hurry. Twitter has, until now, avoided that Internet Troll atmosphere and been a relatively happy place to connect with people online in a very low-key and self-directed way. There are a few Twitter Trolls, but not that many, thanks largely to the anonymous unfollow and anonymous block features. Qwitter changes that, and for what?”

One of the main reason to love Twitter is the free swopping of ideas and conversation between people you wouldn’t other meet, but it doesn’t matter if the following isn’t reciprocal.

I follow plenty of people on Twitter who haven’t returned the compliment, and nor would I necessarily suspect them to. Just because I find what they have to say interesting, doesn’t mean they’re going to think the same about what I say.

And vice-versa. I have a lot of random people following me, some of whom I’ve followed back, some of who seem interesting but I’m not too concerned about following them back, and some who – like some of those I follow who don’t follow me back – I’m sure are lovely people, but there’s no interest there for me. 

To any of those people reading this, sorry it’s not personal! I’m sure I’ve probably lost a fair few Twitter followers because there’s a fair bit of football chat on my feed (which I am conscious of, and have considered setting up a separate feed for) and the sheer banality of some of my Tweets.

But it’s definitely not like Facebook, where there’s a definite awkwardness about having people add you who you’d rather not add, or debating whether you should add colleagues, or ex-girlfriends, and the like. Twitter’s a lot more laid back, and is all the better forward.

Sally at Getting Ink has also been thinking among similar lines, this time in relation to the Twitter Karma application:

“I follow people on Twitter on the basis that I find what they post interesting and relevant to me. It doesn’t necessarily follow that what I say will be equally interesting and relevant to them. So, let’s imagine I’m following someone interesting, but they’re not interested in me – do they then become LESS interesting as a consequence? Should I only be listening to people to listen to me?”

Nonetheless, it feels like Twitter’s slowly moving from the childlike to the adolescent – like the acne-ridden teenager who suddenly becomes aware of the social groups and has to decide (or try) to fit in with them or not. Whether this is a good thing or not, I’m not sure.

How Twitter works best isn’t as a popularity contest or a desire to be loved, but, as Mike Butcher says:

“It quickly became apparent that this was turning into the best use of Twitter of all. Not for long, winding conversations you might have on instant messaging, but short, to the point wise-cracks between people interspersed with a little status update here, a small observation on life there. Twitter was no longer about ’status’ or ‘what are you doing’. It was about conversation, ‘what are you thinking’, ‘what are we talking about’.

The key difference is that people who say “take this conversation over into IM” don’t get it. IM can’t do what Twitter does. You can’t instant message into “the cloud”. With Twitter you can. You can shout or whisper whatever you want to say out into the ether and anyone online can hear you. And anyone following you, even if you don;t follow them, can reply – then you may well become connected.”

And Charles Arthur notes, in his typically blunt but nonetheless spot-on style, there’s only so much Twittering you can take:

“It’s simple really. In an attention economy, there’s only so much time I can listen to what colour your curtains are. Then, I’ve got to get on and earn some money. Please, no hurt feelings though. In the meantime, I’ve resolved to try to tweet useful stuff. Though the temptation to put any old rubbish in is huge, I have to admit.”

I’ve made lots of contacts and a few good friends through Twitter already, and a lot of people in my feed often stick up very interesting links (I’m probably rather bad at doing this). It’s relaxed, interesting and fun. Kind of like an online version of Central Perk, if you will.

What it doesn’t need is people suddenly starting to take it too seriously, which is what a lot of the worry and chatter around Qwitter and Twitter Karma feels like. Have a cup of tea, relax and we can Tweet about it.

***

While I’m on the topic of Twitter, a couple more examples of how the social-networking-cum-microblogging-cum-conversation site is continuing its quest for world domination rise in popularity and usefulness.

Following on from Stephen Fry, no lesser celebrity than Britney Spears has entered the Twitterverse. Or rather a mixture of of her and, possibly, the occasional Tweet from Britney herself.

It’s very different from Stephen Fry, but is a good example of how those working with a big star or somebody slightly less gadget and web-obsessed (those are good thing by the way, before Stephen Fry gets hurt) can use a Twitter feed.

There’s some nice openness and accountability – very Web 2.0, especially this Tweet – with conversation and a team (or possibly just one woman, Lauren) updating the feed reasonably regularly. It’s a good balance for a star like Britney and is a good model for any other celebrity thinking about using Twitter.

What’s more, it gives Britney devotees, of which I’m sure there are many out there (I can’t class myself as one of them, although Toxic was a great pop record) a chance to get closer to her than any celebrity magazine could offer.

Now there’s a thought. Could Twitter kill off Heat magazine?

***

The other sign that Twitter is slowly marching on came in a phone conversation today. I was in PR mode, pitching a small item to a few local papers, and rung an old university friend and colleague who worked on one of these papers.

I’d barely begun explaining what I was ringing about before he cut in to tell me that he knew what I was ringing about and had already mentioned it to his editor, all because of a couple of Tweets I’d done earlier in the week.

Now – if either as a PR or a journalist or both – if that doesn’t get you excited about the power of social media tools like Twitter for ‘traditional’ media work, then I guess nothing will.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Britney Spears, Britney Spears on Twitter, celebrities on Twitter, Facebook, journalism, journalism and social media, online etiquette, online relationships, Qwitter, Stephen Fry, Twitter, Twitter Karma

It’s a brave PR who’d pitch to the Devil’s Kitchen blog. It’s a particularly stupid one who, when emailing said blogger, gets basic information in that email concerning one of the most profanity-filled blogs on the internet so badly wrong:

Here’s a tip for you PR people out there (especially given that I am disinclined to punt your clients’ products simply because you ask**): if you want me to plug your product, may I suggest that you actually get the name of my blog correct?

Under the circumstances, the Devil was surprisingly restrained.

Seeing pitches like this posted on blogs like that annoys me. Not because it’s been posted, but because it makes the rest of us working in similar fields look bad, and suggests the majority of PRs don’t know their blogging arse from their internet elbow.

Cold-pitching to bloggers is a tad unnerving, as you never know how they’re going to react. A lot of PRs I know are still a tad reluctant to engage precisely for the reason, and when they get pulled up online about to, use that as an excuse to ignore social media communities altogether.

Their loss.

At the risk of sounding like a long-playing record, pitching to bloggers isn’t hard. It’s the same as pitching to journalists, just in a different medium and with a slightly different technique.

You wouldn’t email, say, Zoo magazine and address it to Loaded. Or to the Sunday Times Travel Section to suggest a piece for the Guardian. And neither would you send the same pitch for the same product to the Sunday Times as you would to Zoo.

The same goes for bloggers. Each blogger is different, has different likes and dislikes and there’s normally enough information on the blog to give you a good idea of what they’re likely to be interested in, and if they’re likely to take a pitch badly.

So in the case of The Devil’s Kitchen, even a cursory glance will tell you of an interest in politics, libertarianism, alcohol, and Apple products. And while he may come across as an angry young blogger, there’s also a lot of humour and incredibly well-argued pieces on his blog.

This could all be worked out in half an hour, although if I’m pitching to bloggers, I like to spend at least a week reading around their writings to get a good feel for the site – it helps if you know who you’re pitching to. And the better you know your blogger, the better – and, more importantly – and more relevant it’ll be.

It’s not rocket science. It’s simply modifying dealings with journalists and bringing them into a more Web 2.0 way of working. And if you’re scared of having your pitch torn to pieces on a blog, I’d suggest you lack confidence in said pitch. If it’s well-written, well-researched and you’ve taken time to read and appreciate the blog, life should be a lot smoother.

Bloggers are usually as good as journalists at spotting bad PR. The difference is bloggers have an instant medium to detail the worst examples of PR. Journalists tend not to (although there are a few instances in my journalism career where the PR was so bad that blogging about it would have been very cathartic).

Some may be scared by this. Personally, I think it’s a great reason for all PR professionals to use the web as an excuse to up their game, assuming they haven’t already.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Devil's Kitchen, pitching to bloggers, PR

Or, as this could so easily be called, how to perfectly get a bunch of bloggers on your side.

Sometimes, you head off to an event that’s so well organised, managed and presented you just want to go up to the organisers, shake their hands and buy them a drink.

This wasn’t possible last night, due to the amount of free cocktails the organisers kept pushing into my hands.

(A reader interjects: Oh God. This isn’t going to be another London party blog, is it? We expected better from you Gary. You’ve changed. You used to write pithy stories about beard-angst, rage at grammar errors and spending your life visiting towns we didn’t know had football teams. Now you’re blogging about parties. I bet you’re only a short step away from getting thick-rimmed glasses. And a cardigan.)

A small bit of context as to why people kept giving me cocktails. At Smirnoff’s HQ no less.

A while back, Andy Bargery had the idea of organising a (mostly) monthly meetup for bloggers in London. You didn’t have to blog about anything in particular, just as long as you had blogged.

The blogger meetups attracted a wide and varying range of people, from photographers, to local government officials, to PRs (ok, there’s a lot of these), to writers to people who just blog about whatever took their fancy. Put simply, it was a great way to meet new people, and at least you’d be guaranteed to have one topic of conversation.

This month, Smirnoff sponsored the blog meetup and offered use of the bar at parent company Diageo’s HQ, just off Oxford Street. What followed was a masterclass in PR and blogger outreach, thanks to Splendid Communications, the firm representing Smirnoff.

The level of detail was quite astounding. Before the event, Splendid had researched every attendee’s blog and passed on the overriding themes of each blog to the mixologists, who created a unique cocktail designed to reflect the overall spirit of the blog. Mine contained apples (the Westcountry connection), ginger beer and cinnamon (in reference to the beard-angst), and vodka. It tasted a bit like an alcoholic apple crumble.

The hospitality was first class as well. There was free food and drink, and the people from Splendid and Diageo were friendly and welcoming, without pushing themselves – or any kind of product. It was, quite simply, a laid-back venue where everybody could kick back, relax, and socialise, without having a brand pushed in your face at every opportunity, other than the drinks, which nobody’s was going to complain about.

It might be easy to be cynical: why should a brand reach out to bloggers unless they want something. Well, they’ve already achieved it, judging by the number of complementary blog posts doing the round this morning.

Smirnoff didn’t have to go to the level they did, but by adding that personal, fun touch and giving the blog meetup a relaxed venue to chat in, the brand’s suddenly generating a large amount of buzz among some very well read blogs, and ones with ten readers such as this.

What’s more, those present from Splendid and Diageo were genuinely keen and ethusiastic about blogging, helped in no small part by Rax from Splendid, who knew about the blog meetup and had been meaning to attend for several events.

It goes to show the value of having somebody on your team who, if they don’t blog, at least reads and engages with them. It would have been easy for a company to just throw a few freebies at the group and go “Look, bloggers, we are generous. Be nice to us.”

Us bloggers who attended last night ranged from the reasonably influential in their field to a few recent starters who blogged about nothing in particular, and we were all treated the same. I’ve seriously not been so impressed by a corporate event for a long time.

Social media isn’t called social media for nothing. The whole event was a joy from start to finish, with many different topics covered and many fantastic people to keep in touch with on both a business and personal front, all of whom came away with a lovely glow from the night.

And a quick hello to some of the great people (and blogs), some the usual suspects, some first-timers, who were there last night: Melaine Seasons, Annie Mole, Flashboy, Rachel, the TV encyclopedia that is Miss Geeky, pun-loving Hayley, fellow last-to-leave digital marketing extraordinaire Lolly, Sandrine, the lovely Jaz, The Argyle-supporting Lewis Webb, Julius, the brilliant My Chemical Toilet blog, and probably one or two others who I’ve forgotten. Sorry about that.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: cocktails, London Blog Meetup, Smirnoff, Splendid Communications, vodka

Out of the many strange habits that have developed during my office-based working life is to dive onto YouTube at various points in the day to have a quick blast of music. Usually it’s out of a desire to hear a specific track or a specific band that isn’t on my iPod. It’s quick, easy and generally satisfies any urge I may have to listen to Hoddle and Waddle’s Diamond Lights [1].

Like Homer Simpson squeezing juice out of an orange by pressing it against his forehead, I’ve always suspected there’s probably an easier way to satisfy my arbitrary musical cravings. Certainly Muzu looks like it does the job a lot better. Largely because it’s nothing but music on there.

There’s a few interesting features, especially the bit that allows fans to upload their own tributes, video and footage directly to the artist’s profile, and the video player’s embeddable to blogs and social networking sites. It’s also quite artist-friendly, as they share their advertising revenue with the artists and anything fans upload has the copyright assigned to the artist, which is an interesting solution to the age-old problem on copyright v filesharing.

The teenage me would have probably loved the site, given how into music I was back then. Memories of taping every new entry off the top 40, collecting anything and everything to do with a band and the like. The older me isn’t quite so into his music anymore, views festivals as his idea of personal hell and rarely gets to gigs. But can see why music fans would like the site. As my more music loving colleague said when I forwarded her the link: “I love this. I think it’s broken my computer, but when it restarts I’m going straight back on.”

I’m still having occasional problems navigating around the site, but less so that MySpace. And what I’d really like to see is a ‘like this artist – try these’ recommendation on the channels, a bit like the related video bit on YouTube. But most unforgivably of all is a search for The Smiths brings up New Kids On The Block. That’s something that needs to be fixed before hysterical shaven-headed Morrissey fans start throwing vegan soup at the creators.

Techcrunch has been pretty complementary about Muzu and its nice to see YouTube and MySpace get a bit of competition in the music stakes, and music PRs could definitely find it useful, if it takes off. Thankfully, nobody’s uploaded Diamond Lights to the site yet either.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, this is the product the company who emailed me a few weeks ago was pitching. I’m writing about it as I quite like the site. If it was shite, I wouldn’t have. I’ve not got paid or even given a cup of tea for this. And I’m not planning on writing up any old PR bumf that I’m sent on a regular basis. But I thought it tied in quite nicely with the pitching to bloggers post, and theirs was a good pitch. And, as I said, I like the product. I’d have emailed it to a few friends regardless. Not that this write up will make any difference to their hits, I suspect, given that about 20 people read this blog. And not that I feel particularly ‘raaaah, I am TEH ALL POWERFUL BLOGGER, kneel before me puny traditional media’ for doing writing this, as I don’t really invite these kind of PR pitches and I’m not overly likely to write about them. In fact I’ve probably just destroyed any linger credibility I have now.

[1] I have only ever done this once, I’d like to stress.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Muzu, PR pitching to bloggers, YouTube

Following on from my rather lengthy thoughts on best PR / blogging practice, here’s a couple of excellent posts on the subject that should be a must read for any PR bod who’s remotely thinking of getting in touch with bloggers.

First up, Vero has an open letter to all PRs from a blogger’s perspective. And it’s a bit humbling to read, because I’m sure I’ve done a few of the don’ts in my time. But, again, a lot of this stuff isn’t rocket science – it’s just good PR that doesn’t differ wildly from how you’d work with journalists, other than a bit of tweaking and knowing the blogger or blog you’re pitching to.

I’m strongly tempted to print out the post and pin it to the water cooler at work.

Secondly, Catwalk Queen’s Gemma Cartwright follows up Vero’s post with a few of her own experiences and a very thoughtful tone. Again, it’s the kind of thing PR-folk should read and take note, and this paragraph is pins much of the debate spot on:

“By nature, bloggers write opinions, they’re honest and they don’t hold back. The freedom of blogging vs print media is what appealed to me in the first place. I know we’re a bit scary because we won’t pander to people quite so easily. We’re also a bit contradictory. We want to be treated with the same respect as press, but at the same time, we don’t want to be treated like press. We want to be recognised for what we are. A new breed of writers who bring together old skills and new ideas in order to deliver content in a new way.”

And any company that, in the words of Gemma, ‘doesn’t do online’ is on a hiding to nothing. If ignoring a huge swathe of people who are interested in your product is part of your PR strategy, fine. But don’t start complaining when you realise nobody is talking about your product.

Ok, so perhaps that’s a little harsh, but with consumers and audiences increasingly fragmenting and traditional media in the midst of a huge upheaval in working and communicating methods, then traditional companies need to be looking at experimenting (although, in all honesty, this is hardly experimenting) by contacting bloggers or engaging with people who want to talk about their brand.

It’s not scary, it’s not hard, and most people will realise – again, to quote Gemma – that you’re just doing your job. And if you do it well, they’ll respond accordingly.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: blogging, Catwalk Queen, Gemma Cartwright, pitching to bloggers, PR, Vero