Enough Already: Cave Men Want Better Pitches
PR hacks that continue to blast fax and scattergun press releases without targeting the message are starting to make the profession look like a bunch of absolute morons. Enough already. We all know that the technique doesn’t work, so why do we persist in its practice? This weeks Bad Pitch Blog makes my point.
Okay, let’s think about this. Journalists have complained about inappropriately pitched press releases for forever (yes, I think since the first caveman returned from the dregs to find that mistaken pitch for New Fire on his cave wall). And before RSS, Blogs, Email, Internet, et. al., we pretty much had to rely on mailing or faxing press releases. And then we got flack for it.
Marvels of marvels, today we have other ways to get our message out: notably all of the “opt-in” ways to reach the opinion leaders and messengers. Bloggers reach more journalists just through aggregators and subscriptions than from all of those goofy press release announcements.
Not to mention once a journalist comes to you through a blog, aggregator or another opt-in source, they want to know more about you: they ask you for information. And a relationship is formed. And isn’t that our main function: building relationships?
Let’s put the press release tool to better use. Post your releases on your website and let journalists find them. Begin talking about issues and relevant information in your blogs, newsgroups and mailing lists. Link to your press release in your posts. Give journalists, bloggers and readers a reason to talk about you, your company or your cause.
Avoid spamming like your profession depends on it, because it does.
A public relations strategist and writer, Michael Sommermeyer contemplates the convergence of public relations, social media and marketing. He started blogging and building websites in 1993 and has written the WordyMouth blog since 2005.
Michael – Thanks for stopping by Bad Pitch and joining the conversation. It looks like wordymouth is off to a great start. Congrats. I suspect you’ll be getting pitched soon (if you haven’t already). Keep us in mind if you get good ones or bad ones.
Cheers.
Excellent, timely advice. “Cave men.” LOL
I love it!
Great advice. Research and identification of the RIGHT media contacts is the most important step of the media pitching process. Sadly, it’s often the most overlooked.
However, as great a communications tool as blogs are, I’m not sure they’ll ever serve as a news distribution channel in the same way that emailing, mailing, or faxing a news release does.
Blogs are simply too passive to reliably communicate our clients’ messages to the media and the public. True, if a reporter finds your blog and asks YOU for more information, you’re off to a great start, but I’m not going to hold my breath and wait for the new products editor from Men’s Health to stumble into my little corner of cyberspace.
Dave,
You’re right about not waiting for journalists to find your blog; it isn’t going to work.
I recently created a blog to help me at work communicate to the media and I’m pulling teeth getting them to find it and understand how to use it. There have been a few who get it, but the majority don’t have a clue!
So, we still must use the other tools available to us to reach the media. I’ve said before I rarely send out press releases, but I’ve clearly decided to limit our notices to those that are clearly news. It’s just too easy to draft some pretentious news and pass it off as immediate.
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