Good PR practice/bad PR practice - beauty bloggers in their own words

It is common practice for beauty brands to work with beauty bloggers now, as the unbiased nature of beauty bloggers’ product reviews and the accessibility of their reviews across the internet mean that beauty blogs play a powerful part in consumers’ purchasing decisions.

Try it for yourself – Google your favourite beauty product and the likelihood is that beauty blogger reviews will dominate the first few pages. So if someone is considering purchasing your brand’s product and Google’s it to find out more, beauty blogger reviews can make or break their decision to buy.

However, the beauty PR or beauty brand/beauty blogger relationship is still relatively new and so there is a lot of learning to be done – working with bloggers is very different to working with journalists; for one bloggers aren’t generally paid for what they do – they do it because of their genuine passion for beauty products, and you have to remember that most beauty bloggers have full time jobs or are full-time mums and work on their blog in their spare time.

I often see Tweets from beauty bloggers on Twitter talking about the latest PR mishap they’ve encountered, and so I sent a tweet out to bloggers asking them what common mistakes beauty PRs/brands make, so that we can learn how to best approach and work with bloggers... and what not to do.

Here are the bloggers in their own words:

CosmeticsCharlotte72 -

"I've had a PR company contacting me with a copy and pasted message… but forgot to change the name.. Fail!"

OxfordJasmine -

“I like it when a PR company will take the time to call me and ask if I'd like to try a new brand. Groups emails suck.”

Cami Loves Kiwi (in agreement with above) -

“Dear [blank], we really love your blog called [blank], it is awesome...”

Then There Were... -

“Use my name, if you have a deadline be upfront and say that, and remember we generally do this on top of a full time job.”

Beauty Swot -

“PR's contacting me saying they will send something and never sending them.”

I Heart Cosmetics -

“Harassment!”

Then There Were... -

“My ForDGRedial blog clearly states that I don't blog there anymore. So why do they message me 'Dear ForDGRedial' asking stuff?”

Beautylicious Love -

“I dont like correspondence to be all formal. I just like to be me in emails etc and talk to a PR like I would my friends.”

A Little Obsessed -

“I don't like it when PRs call me Sabs.. I don’t even like my friends calling me that! Or when they say Hi Lovely/Hun etc – it makes me think they haven’t bothered to find out my name.”

I’ll leave the last word to OxfordJasmine, who says:

“All bloggers love contact from PRs, but just because they buy you dinner, doesn't mean you'll put out.”

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