That sounds like a perfect challenge to members of my profession. Developing a mutually beneficial relationship between a blogger and PR professionals with clear delineated boundaries of what to send to you and even better, maybe discussing it with you before hand.

So here is my challenge to you Tracy. Start by telling us what a GOOD blogger such as yourself expects of a good PR professional and the top five rules of “pitching” to Tracy Coenen. I am sure we can make it appealing to many PR people out there to begin taking notice, and better yet surprise you by staying on message and respecting the rules.

Let the synergy begin!

That being said, there are plenty of accountants who are bad bloggers too.

I definitely would not mind collaborating with good PR people who have a clue. Especially since I write for AOL @ Walletpop.com which has a much broader appeal than this site and would be a great place to showcase new ideas that have a financial spin.

Very well put. Now see that was exactly what I was referring to in my earlier post. You described exactly what PR professionals can and should do to get their information to bloggers. In my line of work I deal strictly with digital PR, and seeing comments and blogs like yours do not offend me because I am not one of those PR professionals who just bombard a send out list with irrelevant press releases. You gave the perfect example in your post, there are bad bloggers out there, and behold, there are really bad PR people out there as well.

Now here is something incredibly sensible that both sides can do: How about we learn from each other? Good PR people are always tuned in to great tactics that can help them get the word out about their clients. And, since bloggers are relatively new to the scene, but growing in influence and reach, it is certainly up to you guys to let the rest of us know how you want to be approached, when and in what format. The traditional media does it everyday with PR people, so why shouldn’t you? Trust me if there is a good synergy between PR and Bloggers, everyone will win out in the end. Us PR folks by finding a great new outlet for our clients, and you bloggers by finding new and innovative information to keep your blogs GOOD and informative.

I am ceratinly up for a good discussion on how to do that anytime. Sounds like a pure market driven collaborative necessity a PR/Blogger Blog. My god what will they think of next???

I’ll tell you what I’d do if I was a PR person. (Well… what I would have done about 3 years ago…)

I would start looking for prominent blogs that deal with the topics my clients are involved with. I’d watch them for a couple of months to get a real good feel for who is writing and reading, and what’s going on there. Only after I was sufficiently knowledge able about that, I’d approach some of these bloggers who seem like a good fit to figure out how there could be a win-win relationship between us and how I could learn about using blogging as a PR tool.

I probably would also start a GOOD blog. Now, I highlight the word GOOD because there are too many bad bloggers out there. It can’t be just a tool for posting press releases. It must be relevant and bloggy. And it must develop over time. A decent readership there would help develop this new strategy and readers might be very willing to give input.

It just floors me that PR is their lives, yet so many of them are clueless about the whole thing.