Wednesday, May 14, 2008

"Here Comes the Pitch!!"

Regular visitors to my little ol' blog here may have noticed a series of posts in which were listed a wide variety of health-related blogs. Before you think I've gone mad and conducted endless research into collecting all these sources, think again.

The Bulldog Reporter, according to SourceWatch, "is a publication that helps 'PR professionals increase media coverage through smarter pitching.' It is published by the Infocom Group, which pays journalists to make presentations before PR professionals, providing inside advise on how to better pitch and place stories and to cultivate relationships between PR professionals and journalists."

The Bulldog Reporter's Inside Health Media acknowledges that social media (aka blogs) has risen as an influential media source to consumers of health services and products. "Inside Health Media’s huge new blog directory gives PR pros an inside guide to influential bloggers covering health, medicine and fitness."

Of course when I first learned about this massive list, I was curious to see who was on it. Imagine how tickled I was to find that Brass and Ivory and the Carnival of MS Bloggers were listed. Which led me to think - other health bloggers might be interested to know if they too were on 'the list.

Keep in mind that Inside Health Media is hoping to provide a resource useful for PR pitches. But this isn't going to help much if the PR folks don't actually spend a little time getting to know on what subjects each blogger writes.

Yesterday, I received a pleasant-enough PR pitch to write about HPV testing.

Hi Lisa--

It's National Women's Health Week and I've been trying to spread the word about HPV and its link to cervical cancer. I wanted to give you a heads up about the HPV Test in case you'd be interested in writing a post about it.

The pap alone is not foolproof in detecting HPV-- it can miss up to half of the time! But when combined with the pap, the HPV Test is virtually 100% accurate in identifying women at risk for cervical cancer.

There are some good patient testimonial videos at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=DigeneHPVtest

And more information about the test at http://www.thehpvtest.com/

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Now I believe that this person come to me by googling "women's health." And seeing as I've never written specifically about "women's health" it is evident that the only reason I came up on her search was due to the category of "women's health" on the IHM Blog list. But that didn't stop her from pitching the idea to me.

I'm not completely opposed to such things - it's just that there are other bloggers who might be more equipped to speak on this matter. A couple come to might immediately including Diane of A Stellarlife.

So here I am posting the message about including the links. But I'm also going to post some relevant articles related to this. Here goes:

From April 2008:
From October 2007:


From 2003:
From 1999:
From CDC:

3 comments:

  1. Where exactly did you find the list you provided for the health blogs? I am not finding it at IMH. Thanks.

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  2. Seaspray,I'm so glad that you are checking out a few of the posts here at Brass and Ivory. How I came across the list at IHM is a bit of a convoluted path.

    I read the post at the eDrugSearch blog where Cary shared a bit of the email a friend of his who works in PR received. In the email Bulldog Reporter/Inside Health Media was announcing their new list of health-related blogs which had been added to their resources alongside MSM journalists.

    With the announcement was an offer for a 7-day free trial/access to their services to experience the benefits of subscribing to their services. I hopped over to their website and signed up. The next day a representative called me to inquire as to my business, my clients, and how I might use or need IHM. I was granted the 7-day access (the offer, including access to the blog list, expired May 2).

    It was not immediately easy to find the list. As I recall it took me several journeys through the IHM portion of the site before I found a page on which two master links were listed in the sidebar on the far left.

    I no longer have access so I'm sorry that I can't identify the page more clearly. If you do not subscribe to their full service, I'm afraid that you wouldn't be able to find it anyway.

    I hope this helps.

    ReplyDelete