Flickr Image: Hergarty David
Media relations and PR professionals today are beleaguered to not only deliver exposure through traditional media channels, but to also engage bloggers, stakeholders, key influencers and, in many cases, direct consumers.
How do you know if you are conducting a valid media relations campaign or are just contributing to PR spam? I like Drew Kerr’s definition of PR spam: “Impersonal email blasts that contain completely irrelevant information.” Although, clear and concise, it should also be noted that even well intentioned PR professionals can be seen as spammers if they aren’t aware of suggested guidelines or following best practices.
So, in the spirit of Spring and all things new, I thought I’d share some of the, um, more entertaining excerpts I’ve read on this topic and save the lecture for another day.
- PR pro and blogger Dave Fleet offered some advice. One piece is to “Sign your name. Trolls send anonymous messages. Good PR people don’t.” (Am I the only one who gets a mental image here?)
- Stephanie Quilao, in her (now retired) Back in Skinny Jeans blog, wrote an open letter to those pitching her. I’m a huge fan of “telling it like it is” and she bares no bones here. Among her advice was:
- Use the name of the blogger when pitching: “My name, Stephanie Quilao, is written all over my blog on every post and in the “About” page, so use it. Do not address me “Dear Blogger,” “Hello Back in Skinny Jeans” or “Hey Fit Blogger!” Yes, I’ve gotten versions of the “Hey you!” When you don’t use my name, it tells me that you are either lazy, cold, or don’t really give a rat’s [expletive deleted] about who I am.”
- “Stop talking at me and talk with me. Eight out of ten times, this is how your pitch sounds to me, ‘Dear Stephanie, us, us, us, us, {insert product name}, us, us, us, us, {insert press release}, us, us, us, us, enough about us, let’s talk more about us, and what you’ll tell your readers about us…’ You sound like the adults in Charlie Brown, and I tune out because we’re not having a conversation, you’re shoving your agenda at me.”
- Avoid large email attachments. Sally Whittle wrote on her Getting Ink blog, “… and attachments. Dear God, why are we still having this bloody conversation? Only today, I got a 5MB attachment attached to a random press release – twice, because the PR agency hasn’t cleaned its data lately. If you’re using WiFi on a public hotspot or you’re using a 3G dongle or BlackBerry, downloading huge chunks of data is not fun. HUGE waste of time. Don’t do it.”
- In a U.K. PR Week article, Mark Borkwoski says: “PR spam is as contagious as chlamydia and has the same effect. It can cause sterility in the people infected.” While the analogy here is a bit crude, it certainly gets the point across.
- Develop meaningful relationships; learn to effectively communicate. Lou Hoffman sums up relationship-building between PR and the media by saying, “If the PR profession jumped on this bandwagon, we would go a long way toward resolving what the warden in Cool Hand Luke called, ‘a failure to communicate.’”
I can’t wait to hear your PR spam anecdotes or comments – please add to this BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas post.
[...] my last BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas post, I shared some rather entertaining excerpts from journalists and bloggers regarding how they feel [...]
…. and as the recipient of WAY too much PR spam, 99.9% of which is irrelevant, I would add the following:
Don’t put RE: in the subject of your pitch — it just annoys the heck out of me, and since I’ve never sent you an email to begin with, yours is not RE anything.
… and above all, make sure to have an OPT-OUT in your email. Somehow I have ended up on lists I never opted in to — and when you don’t leave me an out, I get even more annoyed. In the US, we supposedly have the FTC’s CAN-SPAM act which describes penalties that range from $16,000 per violation to prison time. Don’t make me use it.
(Just how annoyed do I really sound?)
Excellent points, Trisha, thank you. Nothing like feedback “straight from the horse’s mouth!”