I received an email today from someone called Danielle who claimed to work for a US-based social media marketing agency which counts Mercedes-Benz among its clients.

She said nice things about my blog and offered to pen a guest post for it. So far so good, but the problem was everything about her email just seemed a bit clumsy and unprofessional.

Firstly, she emailed from her personal gmail account. Not the end of the world, but it looked odd when her signature mentioned the company she said she works for.

She also failed to notice that my blog had actually moved (to here) six months ago, even though the last post on my old blog makes this perfectly clear.

Then she made some quite bland suggestions for the content of a guest blog post (for example ‘3 social media tips for finding and engaging your audience’).

Then she offered me $10 ‘for your time’.

This is why I believe PR professionals, who are by nature good at communicating and developing relationships, should be doing blogger relations for brands. No doubt some PR professionals are also capable of clumsy pitches to bloggers, but on the whole I can’t see PR people making the kind of littany of errors shown above.

[One of our free whitepapers is relevant to this subject – The Smart PR’s Guide to Blogger Outreach.]