Blogger Outreach Trends Shaping 2011

Blogger outreach had existed in some form for years by 2011, but this was the year it stopped being an improvised PR side project and started looking like a discipline with its own rules, its own metrics and its own specialist agencies.

Disclosure rules started getting enforced, not just written

The FTC’s endorsement guidelines requiring bloggers to disclose free products and paid relationships had been on the books since 2009, but 2011 is when brands and bloggers alike started treating them as a real compliance issue rather than a formality. Outreach campaigns that had once sent free products with a casual “let us know what you think” now came with explicit disclosure language, and agencies started building disclosure checklists into their standard process.

Klout scores entered the pitch deck

Klout, running since 2008, became a common shorthand by 2011 for deciding which bloggers were worth pursuing. Brands and PR teams started sorting outreach lists by Klout score alongside traffic numbers and comment counts, treating a single composite number as a proxy for influence. It was a blunt tool and plenty of marketers knew it, but it was fast, and speed mattered when outreach lists ran into the hundreds.

Pinterest pulled a new wave of bloggers into demand

Pinterest was still invite-only through most of 2011, but its growth among recipe, DIY, home and fashion bloggers was already visible to anyone paying attention. Brands in those categories started prioritizing outreach to bloggers who were early and active on Pinterest, betting correctly that visual pinboards would become a meaningful referral source before most competitors caught on.

Outreach agencies specialized

General PR firms had handled blogger relations as one task among many for years. In 2011, dedicated blogger outreach and influencer relations shops started appearing, with staff whose entire job was building and maintaining relationships with bloggers in specific niches: parenting, food, travel and small business.

What this meant for a business doing its own outreach

A business running outreach without an agency in 2011 needed three things it might not have needed two years earlier: a real disclosure policy for anything sent free of charge, a way to prioritize which bloggers to approach beyond gut feeling and patience with a channel, Pinterest, that was clearly growing but still too new to have obvious playbooks. None of that made outreach harder in principle. It just meant the businesses that treated it seriously, rather than as a favor economy of free samples, were the ones building relationships that kept paying off past a single post.