How Not To Build Buzz

How not to build buzz in the blogosphere: Tell bloggers how to do their job. Just got this in my inbox from Bubbler:

Hello from Glenn Reid, founder of Five Across (Bubbler people),

We’ve shipped Bubbler 1.0, and the world is starting to notice.

John Battelle, one of the founders of Wired Magazine, posted to his blog yesterday asking who might be using Bubbler. Check it out at batellemedia.com and add a comment and a link to your blog if you are excited about it.

I’m sure this is not really from Glenn (the from email address is announce@fiveacross.com), and actually Bubbler is not a bad tool. But I’m not sure telling bloggers to link to another piece is going to appeal to their sense of having their own brain, not least because Battelle’s piece doesn’t say more than

Bubbler seems like a cool idea, I’d heard of it before, and now SVW has a write up. It’s something of a mashup between blogging and first generation webpage building apps…if anyone is using it, lemme know…

I can well understand it’s hard to hit the right note when approaching bloggers. I think the best way is just the simple, straight way: ‘This is what we’ve just done, let us know if you’d like any more information.’ I’m convinced the way is not to tell them how to do their job. That said, by posting this I’ve now done exactly what they asked what they asked me to, so I suppose it does work.