I’m a nice person. Honest. I don’t kick small children unless they seriously annoy me. I sign petitions to ban things that seem bad, and I always let people in front of me in traffic.
I go “aaawwwww” when I see a cute kitten.
But sometimes, just sometimes, someone makes me feel a bit cranky.
I got an email last week from a PR agency that wanted to “partner” with my parenting blog to launch a social media campaign for their client. They want to increase awareness of the event and exhibitors among parents, hence pitching me, as a parent blogging GURU (I’m thinking of having it on my business cards).
I said I was potentially interested but wanted to know what they meant by ‘partnership’ and what they had in mind.
The nice PR exec called the next day, very keen. The PR agency didn’t really have a detailed idea of how blogs work, and what the campaign would actually ‘do’ but they wanted to run a kind of award for Mums. We spent 20 minutes or so chatting through some basic ideas, and I suggested a particular sort of campaign, and provided a bit of detail on why I thought that would work, what it would involve from the PR agency and the blogger, ie, me.
Next day, I get an email from the PR. “Just to confirm we’d love to partner with your blog on this campaign, and can we meet up to discuss ideas and content?”
“Fine,” I say. “Could you let me know what budget you’re working to on this?”
“Ah,” the PR replies. “We are just looking for this to be content-focused rather than something we have budget for. Is that okay?”
You mean no budget apart from what the client is paying you for coming up with the campaign? So, what you basically mean by partnership is “you don’t get paid” and by “content-focused” I think you mean something like, “you don’t get paid”.
I don't know. I'm always happy to provide a bit of advice to a PR contact, or a bit of feedback. And if something's interesting enough then I'll write about it, no fee involved. But when you're asking a blogger to help devise a campaign, put it together, travel to meetings, and then post something promoting your client, - and all for FREE - then I think that's patronising and crossing a line, somehow.
Or am I being too sensitive?
