I also see panels such as this: "Pitching to Social Media ... How do you pitch to bloggers when most spurn overt attempts to influence them? It’s a whole new PR ballgame and you need a new playbook to get in the game."

Makes my skin crawl. Businesses think they can exploit blogs. But I want to tell blogs to exploit businesses instead: Get what you want out of them. Get advertising money out of them, if you want. Or attention. Or peace and quiet. If a PR company calls you, tell them to have their ad buyers call instead. This is why I generallly won’t do panels at events for PR people. No offense. But there’s nothing in it for us. They want free publicity from us. They want to piggyback on our trust. Well, then, buy an ad.

Tuesday, Jeremy began by saying he "100% supports pitching bloggers," but noted he’s been on the receiving end of clumsy pitches himself. Although his blog is about public relations, he’s been pitched to blog about music sites, for example. He attributed such clunky attempts to junior PR staff working without oversight.

Andrew doesn't mind being pitched but when he asked a flack why public relations people were approaching him, rather than marketing reps, he was told that because he wasn’t being paid to write about Treos, he fell under the purview of public relations.

That line of demarcation is vanishing. A blogger in the audience said a flack had pitched her a story and simultaneously asked about buying an ad. The blogger needed the ad revenue but didn’t want it to influence her decision whether to write about the product. Her solution is to keep the traditional news publishing model in mind, with its church and state separation of editorial and advertising functions. It’s harder to do of course, when the editor is also the ad salesman.

Andrew, who makes a respectable sum of money from his blog, believes blog readers implicitly understand that bloggers make money from advertising and respect that.

Aside from the ethics, practical tips emerged for pitching bloggers:

• Read the blog before pitching it!
  
• Make the pitch short and low-key
  
• Provide a link & contact information for an expert
  

P.S. Here’s a New York miracle: I got out of the cab at the Copacabana Tuesday, schlepping luggage, laptop, swag bag and purse. I went to the coat check to drop them off. I had left the laptop in the cab! I ran back outside. The doorman spotted the cab, which had turned around! The cabbie stopped! The laptop was rescued! New York is full of nice people.

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