Bloggers can be an important part of your marketing plan. If you use a blog on your company site, hiring a blogger makes sense. Your blog stays regularly updated in a professional manner. And yes, you should absolutely give fair compensation to a writer in this capacity (as you would in any other business writing situation).

But what about when you try to get a blogger to write about you on their own blog? Or when you ask them to do a giveaway of your product? Do you compensate them at that point?

Think about this — do you compensate any PR or marketing people in your company or in a consulting firm? Is asking a blogger to write about your company any different?

That’s the question GeekMommy addresses in her recent post, Why Mom Bloggers Aren’t Flipping for Just a Sample of Your Product. It’s a big discussion that has been going on amongst the mom bloggers, and if they are in your target market, you should be reading this post.

It’s a constant battle to figure out what the right thing to do is at that moment since it does seem to change frequently. The best thing you can do is read a blog, get to know the person behind it, and then customize your pitch to fit them. And if they do ask to be compensated for their time — talk to them about what they want or expect. Your employees don’t work for free and many bloggers — who are professionals with educations and interests and opinions beyond what you see on their blog — don’t want to work for free either.

The market is constantly changing. Don’t be afraid to ask around and find out what bloggers want. Just don’t expect them to write about you for free. Those days are gone. And if you don’t believe it, just ask the bloggers themselves.

image: morgueFile

Bloggers have a reputation for being a pretty prickly bunch as far as PR and marketing folks are concerned.  I don’t think we’re too much different than other media folks, though we are more likely to broadcast your gaffs to the ends of the Earth–I guess that makes us a scary bunch.

Regardless Cory Doctorow wrote a guest piece in InformationWeek on how to connect with bloggers (in terms of do’s and don’ts) the points are summarized here:

Have a link.

Have a permanent link.

Have a link for everything.

Use real links.

Use links that go to pages.

Flash sites stink.

PDFs stink. It’s not a Web page (see “Have a link”). It’s hard to copy and paste out of. It doesn’t show up in browsers half the time. The Web is made of HTML.

Streams stink.

Put your URL on your images.

Linking policies are ridiculous.

Don’t worry about “bandwidth stealing.”

Offer high-res images.

Forget the “copyright protection” Javascript.

Enough with the legal boilerplate.

Creative Commons licensing takes the guesswork out of blogging.

Finally: Send suggestions by the preferred means. Source: FlackLife: Cory Doctorow’s simple, effective tips for blogger relations

The biggest suggestion that I’d add is find out what I’m interested in before you email me.  I received a lot of PR emails prior to SXSW.  Being on the press list will do that I guess.  I don’t think most folks checked out what I generally cover.  I won’t call them out, that’s not fair game in my book, but it is just annoying.

How would you like PR/Marketing folks to send you information for your blog?