How To Piss Off a Blogger
Okay, we're going to have a little fun at someone's expense here, but we feel that they deserve it. Or at least, we deserve to. Because we feel rather jerked around, and were ready to ignore it, but recent events have made us feel all the more belittled. So with our viciously sharp HTML claws, we'd like to dig in to the Blog Business Summit's PR department.
We wanted to cover the Blog Business Summit because hey, the blogs, they started here. And now they're all the buzz, with everyone looking to cash in -- which is fine by us, as we make a little scratch at SFist and wouldn't mind making a lot more. Plus, some folks we really respect were going to be speaking and attending. Seemed like a good story to cover with, granted, plenty of snarky perspective. Brian over at The Bay Area is Talking thought so too, and is busy covering the event. But you won't be seeing us anywhere near The Palace Hotel this week.
After the jump, we inquire as to accreditation, smell something fishy, and then have the fishy smell stuffed into our face like our big brother used to with his dirty socks.
Photo of bullshit from Cow Pieology 101 - The Study of Cow Pies by Dr. Keith Lusby and Dr. Tom Troxel of the University of Arkansas.
We shot off a pretty standard media inquiry note:
I'm writing to inquire as to the procedure for media accreditation at the upcoming Blog Business summit. We have covered events such as the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin and will be covering the upcoming BlogHer as well. SFist is published by Gothamist, LLC, a network of city blogs stretching from Shanghai to Paris.Please let me know if you will be allowing press to cover the event, and what you'd need from us for accreditation. Thank you for your
time.
We know, boring, but what are you going to do? Gotta make sure folks take you relatively seriously. And frankly, this boilerplate works 95% of the time. But we'd never gotten a response like this:
Here's what we're doing with press passes--because of the high costs the hotel imposes on us for every attendee registered, we are offering a highly discounted rate to local press just to cover the food costs imposed by the venue: $195.00.We really value pre-conference coverage (naturally!) so this fee would be waived if you were to feature a post about the event (with link) in Sfist prior to the conference.
Sorry to make things complicated :)
Our first thought was, "Who the hell writes PR emails with emoticons?" Our second thought was, "Wait, a fee to cover this thing? That will be waved if we give it pre-publicity? That sounds f**king shady." Lo and behold, after contacting a number of experts with actual 'professional qualifications,' it was considered amateurish if not patently unethical. "My company would consider that beyond the pale," said SFist Eve, our in-house consultant on all things Public Relations. Many other bloggers and journos agreed.
But we let it slide, a little disappointed, and forgot about it. Plus, we weren't so excited about supporting a hotel on the wrong side of the ongoing labor dispute. We don't have lots of money, but we're not going to cultivate a 'coverage for access' culture at SFist. We ask for access because we think something is going to be a good story, and until now, had generally been treated like any other publication doing the same. But we had a nagging suspicion that had, say, KRON 4 inquired, they wouldn't be offered the same 'deal.'
So when we saw Brian was going to be covering the event, we shot him a quick email and asked how they handled his registration. He was nice enough to send us the email he got from the same person we dealt with, about three weeks after our inquiry:
We'd love to see you there. Here is a free press signup link (not fordistribution of course!): [REDACTED]If I can answer any questions or set you up with an interview with us or the presenters, let me know.
Compare and contrast all you want, but it's pretty clear who's the red-headed stepchild here. And we hope you can appreciate the sweet, sweet irony that we were shafted by a conference on the business of blogging, considering that we're a commercial blog. So we wrote the flack back with a minimum of personal outrage, and got the following:
It was mostly a matter of timing, when you pinged me, the venue had me in a smaller space, so I was more constrained on how many free passes I could give out. They have now given us the largest ballrooms available, so I can be more liberal.Feel free to come by for a freebee pass.
Now excuse us for pointing out that our first email talked about "food costs," which we would assume are set to the headcount, not the size of the space. Also, if they suddenly got a bunch of extra space, they might have written us to let us know, since we'd already inquired. So we are officially calling bullshit. All due respect to the folks attending the summit, but to the organizers, crapping on the press is never good business.
Technorati tags, bitches: blogbusinesssummit, bbs05.