My Take on the PR Hullabaloo

Well, it has certainly been an interesting week around the  blogosphere. I’ve seen these situations flare up over and over in the almost 4 years I’ve been blogging, where one blogger writes something and it gets jumped on and picked apart, lines are drawn in the sand, you’re either “for” or “against”.

For the record, in the matter of Trisha at MomDot and her suggestion during a podcast that bloggers spend a week in a “PR Blackout”, count me as “for”.

On Friday, July 10th, Trisha did her weekly Friday Night Live show on BlogTalk Radio. Each week, she picks a topic and members of the MomDot community call in and discuss it. Her topic that week was Blogger Burnout. She talked about bloggers who are online 10 to 14 hours a day who never feel like they are caught up. Sound like anyone ELSE you know? *cough*

On Monday, July 13th, Trisha published a post on MomDot titled P.R. Blackout Challenge in which she posted a P.R. Blackout Badge and issued this challenge:

MomDot is challenging bloggers to participate for one week in August in a PR BLACKOUT challenge where you do not blog ANY giveaways, ANY reviews, and Zero press releases. In fact, we don’t want you to talk to PR at ALL that whole week.  We want to see your blog naked, raw, and back to basics. Talk about your kids, your marriage, your college, your hopes, your dreams, your house and whatever you can come up with for one week.

So, here’s my take. There are SOME bloggers  chatting on Twitter and on Facebook and in each other’s comments about how overwhelmed they feel (including me). About how they started doing product reviews and giveaways because it was fun, but then they found it hard to say no so the requests kept coming and coming, and now even if they start saying no, they still have dozens of reviews and giveaways to catch up on and they don’t know how to just get off the darn computer and spend time with their family anymore (including me).

And Trisha, being one of those people who pays attention to trends and what is going on in the blogosphere, picked up on that and because she is having that same problem too, said in her podcast that hey! Let’s pick a week and take a collective break! Let’s take a week to write about stuff OTHER than reviews and giveaways, you can come here to MomDot and leave a link to your post for others to read, and we can all recharge our batteries together.

Well geez, you would have thought she had suggested we all post obscenity-laden rants against the government or something.  The comments on her posts on MomDot have been downright ANGRY, in a why are you biting the hand that feeds you? kind of way.  A journalist who writes for CNET wrote a post about the PR Blackout and actually ended it with this:

And–just a thought–maybe the real solution to “bloggy burnout” is taking a few days away from the keyboard and spending a little bit of extra time with your kids.

Oh. No. She. DIDN’T.

I encourage you to listen to the original Friday Night Lights show on BlogTalk Radio. It’s 90 minutes long, but it’s a great discussion about how some bloggers, including Trisha, are feeling about their email inboxes and getting caught up on posts and what to do about it.

I’ve tried several times to stop doing reviews and giveaways here on Table for Five.  I’ve made “official announcements”, I’ve replied to pitch requests by saying not on that blog, sorry. But the thing is, I have a hard time turning down an opportunity when the request is coming from a PR rep I’ve worked with for years who says ‘well, Table for Five has the best traffic, we really want that one”. So then I cave in and do one, which turns into two and three and four, and next thing I know, I have THIRTY FIVE emails marked “giveaway”.

I’m going to participate in Trisha’s week of no PR from August 10-16, but I’m not going to call it a “blackout”, because I do feel that the word has negative connotations that she didn’t intend. I’m not going to burn any bridges with my PR contacts, I’m just going to block off a week on my calendar and make sure I haven’t obligated myself to do anything else that week.

Who knows, I may answer reader questions or find memes to participate in, or post more photos from BlogHer. And after that week, I may have new DVDs to review for Click or a cool prize to offer in a giveaway. I’m never going to say that I’ll never post another review or giveaway here, because that just sets me up to have to break my own rule.

For more intelligent posts on reviews and PR and what Trisha REALLY meant in her podcast, I encourage you to visit her “Questions and Controversy” category on MomDot. Comments are open on this post, you’re welcome to leave your own take on the whole situation.

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