Blogger Research is an Unavoidable Chore

I'm in the midst of creating a fairly important list of bloggers for a client. When completed, this list has the potential to generate key publicity for this client. Yet unlike creating a list of mainstream media targets, I'm finding this process more and more tedious.

The reason is implicit in the nature of blogging -- every blog and blogger is unique. Every one has a different point of view and publication schedule. Most of the bloggers I'm targeting are industry people blogging on the side -- that doesn't diminish their importance to my client, but it does provide some likely explanation for the infrequency of their posts. It also makes it especially important that we research them and know exactly who they are before pitching them, because my clients could easily find themselves across a conference table from one of them.

All told, there's really no way around the tedium at this point. It would be nice if one of the media databases had already done this research so I could just pull down a list and go, but they haven't as far as I know. And with millions of blogs out there, it seems unlikely that they ever will.

This is one of the dark realities of the growth of online media and the fall of the mainstream media. Reaching out effectively to individual bloggers is time-intensive, and given the minute audiences of most blogs, probably not cost-effective for most PR people. Yet spamming bloggers with canned pitches, while cheap, is likely to be ineffective as well.

This is why people are talking about the rise of social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) as ways to "pitch" stories into the blogosphere and online without resorting to time-consuming list-building. But social media pitching has its own drawbacks, namely the indirect nature of such pitches and the loss of control once you put something out there.