Coverage Questions !

‘Blogger out-reach’ – Is commonly referred as leveraging the blogosphere.It helps the company in its marketing communications efforts. Its become a popularly adopted tactic by web-based startups and brands that have implemented social-media/web2.0 strategy.

Quite regularly, I am approached for such blog-posts and I quite enjoy them as they give me an opportunity to educate myself about cool developments/launches taking place.

From Where?

I think such requests come from three key categories for target audience:

• Marketing/Communication specialists whom I do not know
• Friends and Referrals
• Totally bizarre spam emails

Under most circumstances (well there are instances when there’s no value for both), I reply to the first two categories 🙂

Request Types

What type of requests do I generally content?

• Product Release(s)
• Feature Update(s)

Think about something more intriguing above two points are quite normal. What else can you do apart from sharing a link/press-release?

What You Need to Think ?

• How is it providing value to my blog readers? Does it really fit my reader-base?
• Address the name clearly. When you write an email to me for example – Please address me by name ‘Daksh’ instead of Hey, ‘You got a cool blog’. Hey XXX(well I’ve seen some funny names really 😉 We’re a cool company and we think this might be useful for your product.
• Are you giving any special invitations/betas, full versions or any value-add which invokes a blogger to talk about you?
• How would you engage in conversation through the blog-post whenever it comes out?

Most importantly, while requesting for reviews be prepared for constructive criticism coz’ that’s one aspect chief contributor of any blog doesn’t want to miss out.