More than likely you saw Office Max’s Elf Yourself promotion during the last two Christmas seasons. If you’re not familiar with it, Office Max created the site to let people upload pictures of themselves or someone they know and put the head on a dancing elf. It was huge. It seemed like everyone I knew and was reading online was talking about it particularly during the Christmas season of 2006. As good as Elf Yourself was, it also had a consequence…it encouraged other companies to try something similar and less remarkable. Case in point: Get Irish Now promoting Irish Springs body wash.

I could spend the bulk of this post talking about how Get Irish Now falls short of Elf Yourself in originality and overall delivery but I think the thing that struck me most is that I found out about Get Irish Now because someone from their PR firm emailed me to let me know. In the email pitch they led with a comparison to Elf Yourself and then went on to compare Get Irish Now to “virtual worlds” and opportunities for people to create their own content online.

Without getting into a really long explanation on this for those who don’t know about virtual worlds like Second Life, neither Elf Yourself nor Get Irish Now are virtual worlds. They’re not even close.

As for the claim that people are really interested in creating content, I agree wholeheartedly but I think the stats that back those claims are more along the lines of social media sites like YouTube or blog or podcasts.

My point here is that if you’re going to pitch yourself to bloggers you really, really, really need to know what you’re talking about and who you’re talking to. If you’re a PR person or just want to pitch yourself, your service, your product, or something else to bloggers you need to know what you’re getting into. For more on this check out what Chris Anderson did several months ago. I also talked about this when another PR firm contacted me in August. In that post I recommended five things to consider when you pitch bloggers and here they are again if you weren’t reading this blog last summer. The full explanations for the points below are on the original post:

• Remember that bloggers are individuals not organizations.
• Be direct. 
• Don’t be a spammer. 
• Bloggers would rather make and break news than react to news.
• Study the individual blogs you hope will work with you.

The bottom line is that pitching your ideas to bloggers is great. I do it too. You just have to remember that you pitch bloggers differently than organizations. Some PR professionals seem to still be learning that.

One final note on Get Irish Now…if you load the site and just wait, meaning you don’t do anything for a minute or two, the guy will come out and harass you. Depending on your sense of humor you’ll either laugh or want to punch him.