Some excellent advice on how to pitch bloggers coming out of the New Communications Forum. Tom Foremski reports on this session by Alice Marshall of Presto Vivace. Required reading for all those interested in this emerging field. I like the down-to-earth, practical approach, and particularly the notion of not being afraid to make mistakes. There will be miscommunications and misinterpretations while the ‘rules’ or codes of conduct are developed. Meantime, transparency seems to be the best approach, so that bloggers know that you represent a firm and can opt to cover the story or not.

I would note that clients are increasingly regarding blog ‘coverage’ as a hit. If you are trying to communicate a message to your audiences and those audiences are reading the blogs, then the end result is the same. We reach out to the ‘A-list’ blogs to that end. It will be interesting to see how those blogs reach up into the ‘tier one’ target for PR campaigns, above some of the more traditional Big Media. My prediction is that consumer tech companies will lead that trend before the business-to-business firms, simply since individual innovators are by definition at the vanguard, and corporations tend to be more conservative in their buying behavior.