I know your job is difficult and largely thankless. Your clients have specific goals and usually a gross misunderstanding of how the press and media actually work. Many think a big mention is going to catapult them to zillionaire status overnight while their phones ring off the hook from celebrities begging them to do their next wedding. Still, even with all this, you have to deliver results. As someone who receives dozens of press releases every week from people hoping to land a mention on my blog, here are some things to keep in mind:
1. Know who you are pitching. This is easy: every blog has an about page with the blogger’s name on it. We’re big believers in Dale Carnegie's theory that people like the sound of their own name. Use it. Spell it right.
2. Do not cc or bcc the entire list of wedding bloggers. Do not make threats. We’re friends. We talk to each other. Your emails get forwarded and pretty soon you have 30 women who want nothing to do with you because you treated one of us poorly.
3. We don’t think you personally are evil. However, pretty much every PR pro who has gone before you in the voyage to clutter our inboxes with irrelevant crap (bridal diet pills, special gel - I'll let you figure that one out, television shows about brides fighting for a terrible wedding with joke vendors) hasn’t done you any favors. No, it’s not fair, but it is what it is. If you want to get press on a wedding blog, it's at the point where you're going to have to do it the old fashioned way – by building actual relationships with the bloggers.
4. Your creative ideas are usually not that creative. Also, they typically display a complete ignorance for the wedding industry and what brides today are actually like. The 1950’s are gone along with the manipulative princess bride of the 1980’s. You actually want us to run a story on how brides can manipulate their "reluctant grooms-to-be" into proposing so that they can win a $15,000 ring? (Not making this up - this was a real pitch.) Seriously, you realize that women today are highly educated and have been paying their mortgages and bills with their own hard-earned money long before they met the man of their dreams, right? Also, with the divorce rate being at 50%, perhaps it's a bit irresponsible to be encouraging men who aren't ready to pop the question to just go ahead and settle down already.
Wedding bloggers need content. We're happy to hear about things that our readers would be genuinely interested in. But treating us as an impersonal checkbox on your to-do list is not the way to get your client press.
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For millennials, the generation that accounts for more than 83% of today's weddings and the first to grow up with the Internet, technology has done more than give unprecedented access to information; it has physically changed their brains on a microcellular level. What worked in bridal marketing just ten years ago is no longer effective because the way today's engaged couples think is actually different than couples of generations past. In 
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9 comments:
Liene, this is very good! Again, extremely good!
Some wedding bloggers seem to favor a PR friend or only someone a fellow blogger has recommended.
Maybe one of these days you can also pen an open letter to exaggeratedly rude wedding bloggers who believe that because a few PR reps may have sent them an incongruous press release, all of us are the same and use the same ethics (or lack thereof) when doing our job.
amen sister
Hear, hear! Great post Liene, this should be required reading for all PR peeps. And while we're at it, wouldn't you also appreciate a little attention to grammar and spelling? How is it possible that so many pitches go out without even being run through a quick spell-check? For me, this can make even good clients and products look really bad.
Well said, Liene! I don't know you, but I love you. :)
Great points and totally agree.
Oh this is good... I am most certainly passing it along. Thanks, Liene!
You said it girl.
I'm a PR person myself that likes to build relationships, no matter who is breathing me down my neck pressuring me to send a mass email.
It's funny because not only is building relationships more effective, but it's also more enjoyable.
Here's to hoping that your letter helps other PR peeps figure that out. :)
Bravo! Very well said and quite true. I am not just a wedding blogger, but also an event planner (primarily weddings) and I get some of the most tasteless requests for items and ideas to pass on to my brides. My name is almost always spelled wrong ("Dear Kristin")even though the correct spelling is in the name of my business, "Parties by Kristen." Hopefully some of these agencies and vendors will read this and take it to heart.
Right on!
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