Susan is attending the Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in Washington DC this week and she reports that her head is swimming in new ideas. You can read all about it on the Womma blog but here is a sample from today when David Binkowski from Hass MS&L and Michael Masnick from Techdirt offered ten simple guidelines for blogger relations:

1. Be truthful and don't relay false information.
2. Say who you are and who you work for.
3. Respect the rules of the venue. You're on the bloggers' turf, mind your manners.
4. Don't ask bloggers to lie for you ... ever ...
5. Use extreme caution (and extreme common sense) when communicating with minors or on blogs intended to be read by minors.
6. Don't manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact blogger income
7. Don't spam or use bots or automated systems.
8. Don't compensate bloggers without full and honest disclosure.
9. If you're going to send trial products to bloggers, understand that they don't have to comment on them -- and know that they are free to send them back to you.
10. If they write about the products you send them, proactively ask them to disclose the products'source.

They also remind us to:

* "READ THE DAMN BLOG FIRST"
* Find out their preferred method of contact (phone, email, form, comments)
* Don't spam them (ever ... seriously ... don't do that)
* Keep the initial contact short -- this is not the time to try to get your brand message across

-Jeff