You might think that all the "A-list" bloggers have a nice life, right? People like Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and others all regularly get invited to conferences, get more than their fair share of blogosphere recognition plus a lot of media attention. Sometimes their blogging even leads to career opportunities.
The reality is, however, there's a downside too. When you get too popular the official and unofficial PR people start banging on your door. (When I say unofficial I mean evangelizers who maybe are not public relations professionals by trade.)
My friend Robert Scoble is one "A-list" blogger who clearly is seeing his inbox fill up with pitches. He talked about this a bit at Bloggercon - I listened to some of the super Podcast this weekend. Today, he took the next step by offering up a PR tip. The Scobleizer writes...
"Get five of the bloggers I read to write about you. Even three, if you're lazy. Find a way to do it. I read more than 2000 blogs now (957 RSS feeds). So, finding five out of those 957 isn't difficult.
You get five, and I'll see that as a pattern when I do my reading, which is what I'm doing right now."
I commented on his post, asking for him to give us some sense of importance. Steve Gillmor gives us some insight into Scoble's patterns, but I was interested in seeing if some blogs have a greater influence than others. Scoble responded that he reads all of his feeds in alphabetical order...
"So if you want to be high on the blog, you should get the guys later on in the alphabet to blog your product first. :-)
It helps a lot. I like to link to other bloggers who have something to say about your product too. Same as journalists. They need quotes to make their stories look like something other than press releases."
In my mind, what this means is that much like columnists and journalists look for trends and scoops, so do A-list bloggers. When Robert says he looks for news that's been commented on by several other bloggers, that's essentially what he's doing. I also know he likes to break news too. Who doesn't? If you remember, he was the first to talk about Bloglines and FeedDemon tying up. Someone clearly gave him the scoop.
The upshot here is that influencing the top bloggers to write about your client or company is getting harder and much like reaching journalists. It's consistent with what looks to be a growing convergence between small media and big media. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
