How To Split An Atom

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There is a running gag out there that if there were no marketers on the web there would be no one here at all, and if there weren’t any PR folks, it wouldn’t matter because no one would know anyway. Good PR people are a rare and beautiful breed. They are professional, insightful and know publishers well enough to only toss them the clients that fit their interests.

Bad PR, well, bad PR is the subject of of today’s article.

Honestly, it’s not you, it’s us. There is something about reading a generic sales pitch for a product that sounds a whole lot like ten of the thirty other products that found their way through the spam screen that makes web publishers a little crazy. Perfectly reasonable bloggers will completely lose it at the sight of a bad pitch — it’s written into our DNA. You have to understand, professional journalists are paid to have a touch of patience for that sort of thing, most bloggers aren’t.

Good PR

That’s why the biggest tip I could give you if your pitches are falling on deaf ears is to make them interesting. Give the publisher you’re courting a reason to believe what you believe in. Make them hungry to write about your product. If you give them something the ignites their passions, they will write about it — they won’t be able to help themselves.

Even if you’ve done enough work on the web to have this basic idea down, here are a few more helpful suggestions to help you get into the front door.

Get the name right

I can’t tell you how many times I have received, or have heard stories of others receiving requests to print stories from emails that were addressed to some generic name (”dear webmaster”) or worse yet, the wrong name entirely. If you don’t know an author’s name, take a minute to figure it out. Remember, you are asking them to take time out of their days to review your product, write something about it and fit that article into their publishing schedules. If you can’t even put out the effort it takes to get their names straight, don’t expect them to jump at the chance to help you.

Fair embargoes

Most of us respect embargoes. If you ask us not to print something for a few days, that’s not a problem. That being said, we reserve the right to avoid printing a piece if it seems like your embargo is less to protect your launch details from prying eyes and more to “manage the release.” Nothing is quite as frustrating as seeing a story, which is basically a mirror image of the press release, printed on another blog an hour before yours can be thawed. If you are going to use embargoes, be fair about how you arrange them. Blog popularity is in constant flux, you never know when tossing a smaller blog a bone might come back to help you.

Don’t use copy and paste

Mail clients all handle copying and pasting text differently. Many of them will change apostrophes along with a few other characters into completely unreadable garbage. As a publisher, one of the surest signs that you might be receiving a “dear sir or madam” pitch is when you scan the text and start noticing these artifacts. If you are going to copy and paste, take the time to check over your work. ’ takes away credibility from your pitch and destroys any personalization you might have been working on.

Write personal introductions

Most of the best pitches I have ever received have been the most casual. Publishers want to know who, what, when, where, why and how to find out more — beyond that what’s most important is to prove that you choose to talk to them for a reason. It’s easy to pick a dozen bloggers out of a hat and fire off some form emails, it’s much harder to do the research, take your time and speak to a select group directly. The reward, however, is that when you speak to publishers as people it is a lot more likely that they will take the time to work their way through your pitch.

What are your PR horror stories? I’d love to hear them, from either side of the pitch.

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