Bad PR Pitches: The Final Straw
Thursday, July 30th, 2009My 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
