Four tips for food blog PR

There has been debate on the Australian food bloggers group about opting in or out of the public relations onslaught, mostly because when it comes to food blogging, some PR people act like dicks.

It is no great secret that Australian business is a long way behind the US when it comes to online PR. It is something that an Australian PR agency might tack on to their services but few (if any) specialise in online in Australia or do it consistently well because there is not a great deal of cash in it for them yet. As it is dawning on the industry that print media as we know it is doomed, jumping on the social media bandwagon is the action de jour.

My four tips:

1. At the very least, read some of the food blog before you fire off a press release.

It’s not that hard to work out the topics in food that are of genuine interest to a particular food blogger. Read their blog. You’ll soon discover that food blogging is a broad church and it is not likely that your clients’ product will align with the interests of all food bloggers. If you’re doing your job, you should be able to find a good fit somewhere.

Unlike print media, unpaid food bloggers are under no compunction to put out regular editions or posts. There is no pressure to fill column inches and so this negates the need for bloggers to trawl through press releases at the end of the day just to churn out a few hundred words. For most food bloggers, press releases have zero value.

2. Even better, don’t send a press release at all.

Cut the “positioning” bullshit. You’ll get much better results if you engage in intelligent conversation because for most food bloggers, intelligent conversation is their modus operandi. If there is nothing intelligent that can be said about your client’s product (or your client’s product does not relate to food for humans) then just maybe you should question your future career in public relations.

Approach this as if you’re forming a relationship that will last forever. Most food bloggers don’t think in terms of discrete campaigns or product launches: the biggest mistake that PR folk make when approaching any social media is that they expect that it will last for the life of the campaign and not any longer. If you burn bloggers early, it is likely that you’ll have to work extremely hard to get them back on side for any future campaigns or other unrelated clients.

3. Link to me and send me traffic.

If you want me to sit up and pay attention to your (or your clients’) website, link to mine and send good traffic; the traffic that reads more than a single page and adds comments. I segment my traffic and notice that behaviour. Write your own food blog or get somebody to write one who cares rather than spamming out press releases. I still wonder why clients would ever trust an agency to do “blogger PR” when the agency (or its staff) do not run a blog.

4. If all else fails, food bloggers are very easily bought.

Most food bloggers love free shit; especially meals and the feeling like they’re receiving something exclusive. You’ve only got to look at this food blogger meetup organised by Club Med just to see that even if your food is not necessarily the greatest in the world, you can still buy fawning coverage by some of the world’s biggest bloggers. POM juices got coverage aplenty simply by mailing out juice and holding a competition. The trick is permission and not expecting anything directly in return. Ask people’s permission to send them free things. Ask for their advice rather than “write about this in your next blog post!”.

How to food blog: breaking Food Buzz

I know that this is a little trite, but relearning how to play Javascript for the 4 Ingredients post has emboldened me to break Food Buzz, the giant “Web 2.0” food blog content scraper. If you want to stop Food Buzz from using your content (but still retain the incoming links and traffic from Food Buzz), put the following bit of code between the <head> </head> tag on your blog.
<script type="text/javascript"> if (top.location!= self.location) { top.location = self.location.href } </script>
This will redirect the framed Food Buzz pages back to your unframed site. For example, go to http://www.foodbuzz.com/blogs/kr/korea/960180-dosa-hut and you’ll be redirected.

Just as a small warning for Blogspot users: this affects the ability to edit the template on your blog. If you have any problems editing your template, turn off javascript in your web browser. Once you’ve finished editing, turn javascript back on.

4 Ingredients

Thanks to the Twitter procrastination pipe and Ed Charles, I recently became aware of the 4 Ingredients cookbook and associated television show. After the unshakable rage and bewilderment had subsided on my first viewing, I realised that it should be me profiting from people’s inability to not only cook but select appropriate means of learning to do so, rather than a pair of nasal blondes from the Sunshine Coast.

Their recipes seem thoroughly random; the sort of thing that a 6 year old would concoct to impress a parent on their birthday, picking ingredients from what was at hand in the average middle class fridge and combining with gay abandon. Yoghurt, cornflakes and chicken, together at last.

No, seriously.

How could the public be so easily duped?

So I present to you the 4 Ingredients recipe generator.

Press reload for more recipes. Press it one hundred times to generate your own bestseller.

Press reload for more delicious 4 ingredient recipes!

Addendum: Sorry, I mixed up Ed Thomas with Ed Charles

One Food Blogger per 120,000 Australians

I updated my list of Australian food bloggers and in my post-work statistical analysis haze, I pulled out Excel. There are 176 blogs in my list, broken down as follows:

State	No. of Blogs
WA	12
NSW	43
SA	7
VIC	82
QLD	16
ACT	11
Tas	5
NT	0

As percentages, the results seem pretty obvious: food-obsessed Melburnians creating the bulk of the food blogs followed by NSW and the other smaller states lagging behind.

But then we haven’t adjusted for population differences.

The surprise: in the ACT there is one food blogger per 30,983 inhabitants, the clear leaders when it comes to producing food bloggers. NSW and WA produce food bloggers at roughly the same rate (one per 161,092 people and one per 177,566 people respectively).

If you write a food blog in Australia, you’re one in 120,330 people.

If you’re missing from the list, let me know.

Food Pornographers against Internet Censorship

Bananas!

If you haven’t been following Australian news, the Australian Government is about to embark upon its attempt to censor the Internet (or at least, censor websites and not HTTPS, IPv6, encrypted data or the torrentz, which is where the depraved of Australia will flee to get their porny fix). For me, it is going to be a great time to be working in the “Internet industry” and have the rest of the industry elsewhere laughing at you.

To take a guess, the first websites to be banned as “false positives”, (where a site that the filter says is illegal, but is in fact, not) will be food websites. Who else turns charcuterie objects into a fetish or makes the same volume and diversity of dick jokes about vegetables? These are freedoms that are dear to the heart of many Australians and need defending.

If you’re keen to do something about it, the irrepressible GetUp is running a campaign.

Alternatively:

Call the Minister

Express you opprobrium in person. Call Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s office on (03) 9650 1188 and have at them.

Write to the Minister.

A physical letter to the Minister clogs their inbox in a way that email cannot. Mail to:

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

Email the Minister

Pretty much a waste of time, but worth a try. Email Senator Conroy at: minister@dbcde.gov.au.

Food Blogging as Wunderkammer

More than occasionally I wonder what is food blogging and how can it continue to differ (and differentiate itself) from other media. The late-90s chestnut of blogging being “all about community” has been all but superseded by real communities moving online. As much as I’m not a huge fan of Facebook, there’s 120 million other people whom think otherwise. Then this week I came upon, this article from Julian Dibbell:

A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums — to the “cabinet of wonders,” or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid — the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Just so, the Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the “discovery” of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.

If you’re in most of the developed world, you’re bombarded with data about food: maybe food blogging is just an attempt to order it while staying in a state of constant amazement.

Spring blogging doldrums

Spring scared the hell out of me this year. It is so much more radiant and incredible after living in the tropics for a while. Trees aren’t supposed to change colour and regrow. In the tropics, most trees that look as if they are dead are in fact dead with invariable certainty. I’m blaming this existential botanical terror on my lack of updates of late. I have no good reason.

I’m eating great food and not telling anybody at all about it, just like regular people.

And I’m busy: over at SBS, I’ve been rolling out an article on “world food” per week on Wednesdays for the Mouthful blog and my very first article on Melbourne for Wall Street Journal Asia appears soonish.

Also: if you happen to be in Bangkok, be sure to check out food blogger Austin Bush’s exhibition, The Last Chinatown at Kathmandu Gallery, 87 Pan road (near Indian Temple off Silom road) Bangrak, near the Surasak or Chong Nonsi skytrain stations from 6 December. It’s the culmination of a year’s worth of him trawling the back streets of BKK’s Chinatown.

Last Appetite turns one.

The Last Appetite is one year old today (if you don’t count the placeholder post that I made a few months prior to real launch). In that time, I’ve eaten in six different countries, written 100-odd posts and according to my spam protection, I’ve received 4,300 spam comments.

It’s my 1004th day of food blogging since Phnomenon.com kicked off with a very bad fish amok recipe.

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