Following the Chris Thilk-inspired LOTD from earlier today, I'm taking that same tack.
I had forgotten to post a link to this key item from the Bad Pitch Blog from last month, when Kevin Dugan posted a short quiz for PR folk to take before pitching bloggers. Thankfully, the excuse to do so quite late showed up on my doorstep, er, in my office, this morning. When asked why they clearly hadn't taken the quiz, at least one firm told us to step aside, because we clearly underestimated their ability to get bloggers to "place [this] banner and Public Service Announcement pro bono," on their blogs.
Our own Allison Blass brought this "situation" to my attention a few minutes ago while having a brief meeting, and I've gotta say that I wouldn't exactly be happy with the outreach efforts so far if I were the PR people at LifeScan. Do PR people really think that just because a group of individuals happen to post on a health related topic that they would automatically post a "public service announcement" that isn't exactly a piece of video I'd run around sharing with bloggers, of all people, or put up banners on their blogs, "pro bono," that are promotional to a product or service? Sure, there's a contest involved, and I get that, but clearly people have too much confidence in their pitches if they think that something self-serving is going to get the same feel-good action that a firm reaching out to diabetics about a banner for World Diabetes Day - even on behalf of a for-profit corporation - is going to?
Sometimes I really wonder if public relations firms don't want to truly explain the dynamics of working with bloggers - that is, when they actually appear to know about them - for fear of "turning off" a client. Someone at the firm responsible for pitching this "PSA" should have known what kind of reaction it would get from the bloggers being reached, but instead it went ahead full bore.
Coming out and saying that your product has cool colors and that's an improvement over what might have previously been seen at boring is perfectly valid. Coming out and saying that since your product now has cool colors, that people with a medical need will use it more often isn't necessarily the case, especially if the tone of the commenters on Diabetes Mine can extrapolated across the masses. When I bought the Product RED iPod, it didn't make me use it more, it made me feel like I had a cool product. Color might add value to your feelings towards something such as a blood glucose monitor, but is it going to make you use it more? For an industry that's full of disclaimers and "oh, we didn't actually say THAT," this is a big jump off the wrong diving board, IMHO.