Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > March > 09 > Entry
Another slow start, bloggers versus journalists, and Zuckerberg
I woke up this morning feeling like I had been run over by a truck.
Strange, I hadn’t had a drop to drink last night. I wasn’t hungover.
True, I had gone to the Google party. But I had been home by 9 p.m. and in bed by 11:30 p.m. I was downright prudish by SXSW standards.
Then I looked at my clock. I had forgotten all about daylight savings time but my cell phone alarm hadn’t. It was 8 a.m., my snooze had been going off for an hour.
After staggering toward the Austin Convention Center, stuffing an Einstein’s bagel and two Tylenol into my mouth, I arrived at “The Female Takedown of Casual Gaming,” a half-hour late.
The panel was interesting, and included a lively discussion of women “power players” who help their young children “level up.”
But I felt so sleep-deprived I found myself dozing off.
Thank goodness for the next panel: “Top Ten Ways to Piss Off a Blogger.” This panel woke me up, no caffeine required. Hosted by Rohit Bhargava, it included a great give-and take between the attendees, which included a good split between bloggers and marketers. The take-away is this, in no particular order:
-Don’t spam bloggers (what’s interesting to me, is this lesson wasn’t also applied to journalists. So only bloggers don’t like unpersonalized e-mail pitches?)
-Don’t act like you read a blogger’s site when you don’t.
-In the ultimate double-edged sword, don’t treat them like journalists, but don’t exclude them from the privileges that journalists get, either.
-Don’t properly attribute something from a blog.
-No attempt to establish a relationship with a blogger. This includes asking for favors from a perfect stranger, like asking them to blog about a topic and get it up by the end of the day.
-Not formatting movie files, etc. so they can be easily posted.
-Before pitching, make your pitch relavant and find out if blog’s site has a section where he or she writes about the kinds of pitches he or she would like to get.
It was an extremely interesting discussion, especially from my standpoint — what bloggers would call the MSM: Mainstream Media. Many of these marketing lessons, it seemed to me, applied equally to bloggers and journalists.
It was interesting to hear that bloggers seem more willing to demand these things from marketers, and complain when they don’t get them.
Now I’m waiting in a mostly empty ballroom for Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook, to speak.
I thought this was the most high-profile event of the conference but there is hardly anyone here. Mostly it’s media folks and eager bloggers.
Stay tuned for more coverage on Zuckerberg’s interview at SXSWi.
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