Bad PR Pitches: The Final Straw
July 30, 2009 – 9:14 pm | by Daryl TayMy blog has been quiet for the last week or so thanks to a trip to Hong Kong (which I enjoyed immensely), and imagine my reaction when I got home and found mutiple emails that just offended my senses. The gist usually is something like this:
Hello,
Our awesome event [insert name of event] has secured awesome speaker [insert name of speaker] to be at said event on this awesome date [insert date] together with other awesome speaker such as [name drop #1], [name drop #2] and [name drop #3]
Attached is the press release and a photograph of the awesome speaker. Please tell the world about it on your blog
Really? Dear PR person on the other end of the email, if you had such a request, would you do anything to act on it?
Borrowing a little from Jeremy Woolf’s blogpost, Dear spammers, can we have our social media back?, I’ve decided to come up with a few “rules” for my blog:
1) The pitch had better be relevant to me, my blog, and my readers. I’ll leave you to decipher what that means.
2) The pitch should not include a press release. A social media release or a link to graphs/videos is fine.
3) Provide a beneficial call to action. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m not your news channel. If you think said awesome person is so interesting, offer me a chance to meet him or her over lunch or an invitation to the event so I can blog about how awesome I thought the person was after that.
I’m going to put it as plainly as I can: such emails are spam. And following this blog post, I will mark all emails as such and forward the email to whoever the contact person is on the company webpage (hopefully the CEO) and explain why it offends me. I’m also giving serious thought to starting a PR blacklist wiki. Sure I might miss out on some really relevant piece of news months down the line, but that is a price I’m gladly willing to pay.
Tags: bad pr, bad pr pitches, blacklist pr, call to action, final straw, hong kong, mutually beneficial relationship, news channel, press release, social media release, spam
5 Responses to “Bad PR Pitches: The Final Straw”
By Jonathan Wong on Jul 30, 2009 | Reply
I agree with you 100% and I really don’t have anything else of value add to the conversation.
However, I just left a comment because I found the tags you used to describe your blog post quite amusing.
(See, I told you I have nothing of value to add…)
By Daryl Tay on Jul 30, 2009 | Reply
@Jonathan Wong: Haha thanks! You know, I’m always happy to have “I agree” comments
By Jeremy Woolf on Jul 31, 2009 | Reply
Amen Daryl. I guess the tragedy is that many PR folks have simply taken the worst of media relations practices and thrown them at bloggers. I’ve always said, the best way to learn is through real-world experience. Hopefully actions such as yours will help PR people get through the learning curve and improve their behaviours. BTW, we’ve completed a global survey on blogger relations – http://bit.ly/DkKZe – some links and insights here that the PR community needs to take to heart.
By Roshni on Sep 11, 2009 | Reply
Beautiful post. I think there are an equal bunch of great PR people and agencies out there as there are the downright spammy annoying ones.
Edelman is my fav PR agency. They’ve mastered the art of asking for something without being pushy or annoying!
By Daryl Tay on Sep 13, 2009 | Reply
@Roshni: Yes and unfortunately clients don’t seem to be doing a good job of weeding the bad from the good! Although it has to be said sometimes it comes down to the individual handling the engagement..