Press Releases could end up in the spam folder
I’ve been busy in the last few weeks. Busy developing, curating, publishing, being social, I’ve even made it down to the gym a few times.
My inbox has been particularly full, but not always with things that are a priority. It’s increasingly stuffed with press releases, competitions, SEO articles and generally stuff that I now deem as spam.
Not because it’s sent by a bot but because the content is poor quality, unthoughtful, badly researched and sometimes just a awfully bad marketing proposition. It’s just bad public relations, whether it’s done by a PR firm, a company itself or even another blogger.
The biggest talent you can have is to be able to put yourself in the mindset of the specific travel blogger you are pitching a campaign at. Would your approach work if you were in the bloggers position? It’s worth reading 5 Steps To Bootstrapping Your PR Efforts over on SEOmoz.org too.
Back to my situation. Take last week, I received 10 press releases. I have never published a press release yet, we are not a print magazine or newspaper, we work in a completely different manner to that of the old media. I also recently received 4 follow up emails from one company seemingly amazed that I didn’t seem interested in the launch of their new non-independent website.
Do they not know how busy we are? We do not have full time staff to promote our own website and to engage in social media let alone promote their business, for free.
Some approaches make me laugh – a poor executed info-graphic or poorly masked attempt for SEO backlinks, but some just make me angry. Mainly due to the lack of creativity or lack of overall effort that’s been put into researching our own site, they’re not only wasting their time, but mine as well.
Firstly I want to moan about a few things, but bear with me for a while because I think I have a point.
First up, competitions. Just because a company is running a competition does not automatically mean that I am going to publicise it. In fact if you knew anything about our site you’d know that we rarely publish those types of articles. Why would I want to publish a competition for free for a company? I work extremely hard developing, maintaining, creating content, being active on social media we don’t have time to promote non independent companies latest marketing campaigns for free. It just seems amazing that these companies treat bloggers and websites as a tool to get leverage for their SEO or marketing campaign free of charge. It’s pretty short-sighted when executed in such a brash manner.
Think about it, we work extremely hard to push our site in the right way. Publishing what we think is useful content, being active in the industry on and offline. Then when we receive an email about a brand new competition from a big company, should we somehow be in awe and shout from the roof tops about it?
Online and social media works in very different ways to that of traditional marketing, you have to be selfless and grasp a good understanding of the community. Also, what is it with people tweeting at me with their website? If I see their tweets and read their profile I might check out their website but tweeting websites and links at me (mentioning us) that don’t even feature our site is not the right way to approach it, they are deemed as spam in my eyes. It should be a twitter rule for newbies, don’t tweet a link mentioning someone unless it’s really relevant to them.
The worst kind of SEO marketers are those that pretend to be a passionate travel blogger as they attempt to sneak SEO back links into their articles. They are wasting their time and mine, after all if they had done any research they’d know my day job is in SEO. Unfortunately their type of SEO gives mine a bad name, I firmly believe in engaging in the online community via social media, producing brilliant resources and content in order to gain rankings. Not to spam people’s websites with SEO articles or to pay for back links in order to attempt to rank highly. Thankfully those practices are slowly dying.
Press releases are pretty much useless to us unless they relate to the content of our site. When I say related I mean in a way that it is the type of content we publish, not just that it is in the releams of travel but something much more specific. We only publish hotel, bar, tour reviews etc if we have experienced them first hand. So a press release about a discounted hotel price is useless unless we actually have had chance to visit it. This is not to say that other more news related sites wouldn’t be interested in such content but it should be important to figure out who they are sending the content to in the first place. Not only are you wasting people’s time but you are damaging the relationship to a certain extent.
A piece of content has to be exceptional and tailored to our publication, not only that but it needs to be engaging and above all, selfless. To bloggers we do not want to see yet another PR company or company itself asking us to publish something just for a lead, for them to make money. Why would we want to do this for free? After all isn’t it the companies with the money? Perhaps they should be doing something for us, for free? Aren’t we the ones with little to no budget?
Any hint that a piece of content is a thinly vailed attempt to drive conversions for a service or product means I’ll ignore it. There is plenty of content around the web and especially from bloggers, most of whom aren’t looking to gain financially that I’d much rather give coverage. This is the battle for companies and to succeed they have to provide something exceptional. The truth is even on twitter instinctually I’d rather tweet a fellow blogger than a company because at the back of my mind we can’t help but think it’s all for an ulterior motive. This is why transpancy and selflessness are crucial for credibility.
It’s not all negative, the Digital Detox holiday by @DiscoverSVG was a great example of how to engage without being intrusive and also having a intriguing campaign to back it up.
I had a twitter conversation with @DiscoverSVG (St. Vincent and Grenadines Tourism Authority) recently and I found them interesting. They mentioned that they did a digital detox holiday (at this point I still didn’t really know who they were on Twitter) but only because it was completely on topic and responding to something I tweeted. There was no major push or selling of the concept, they just mentioned it. I decided to check it out and found the whole concept an engaging one and an interesting discussion point.
I wrote a blog post about the detox holiday because it was relevant to my readers (travel bloggers) and an interesting angle of discussion. They didn’t aimlessly send me an email about it, they didn’t pay me or offer any incentive. I wrote about it for free because it was an interesting and engaging campaign that related specifically to my niche.
I may sound like I’m ranting, well I am. These approaches anger me because of their laziness more than anything, it takes creativity and effort to produce something really compelling that people will reference and share. Why be lazy when putting some real effort in will produce much more effective results, not just for yourself but for those you should be building relationships with.
Bonus tip: For anyone creating a profile on TravMonkey.com just to create SEO links to your wesite – the profile isn’t indexed by search engines until you publish at least one article.
We’ve created a great community of talented and passionate travel writers and readers and it’s a disservice to these people to try to game the system.
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