Nice job by the folks at Ogilvy PR to come up with a code of ethics in conducting blogger media relations. Their code is reprinted below in its entirety. It’s as much a Code of Blogger Media Relations Best Practices as it is a Code of Ethics.
It’s an outstanding starting point and something every agency (and corporate PR department) should simply clip and paste on the wall (does anyone do that anymore?). Or pass it around in an email.
Ogilvy PR’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics
- We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
- We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
- We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
- Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
- If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
- We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
- In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
- We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
- We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
- You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
- If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
- If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
- Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.
