Stupid PR Quote of the Week: May 19, 2008
With all of the crap going around about Gina Trapani’s latest PR blacklist, it seems fitting that the latest ridiculous quote from the PR blogosphere be along those lines (and I’ll be addressing the issue of blog pitches again a post or two down the road). But for now:
The Offender: Matt Haughey
The Source: Stop Asking, Start Filtering - A Whole Lotta Nothing
The Quote: “the perfect PR person would match me up with topics I write about and when they figure out a perfect product pitch I might be interested in, email me personally once to share it, and ask me for confirmation if I’d like to get future email from them. Unless I reply back with a “yes” don’t add me to a list or pitch me again — it’s a not a good match and is only going to build frustration on my end if you keep sending unsolicited pitches.“
The Stupidity: I’m in a pleasant mood, so I’ll be a bit easy on Matt. I think the problem here is less stupidity and more ignorance. There’s a reason I emphasized the second half of his quote.
The problem is that Matt’s essentially saying “If I’m not interested in this pitch, I won’t be interested in any other you may have in the future.” If you’re strictly talking about a PR rep for a one-product company (the only way you could possibly know what future releases might be about), that might be fine and dandy.
The reality, however, is that many of these PR folks being blacklisted lately are from firms. They represent multiple clients. While you may not be interested in news from one client of theirs, you may be extremely interested in something new coming from another client they’re working with.
My advice to Matt and other bloggers: don’t try to lump all PR pros together. It just makes you look hypocritical when you’re saying you don’t want us to do precisely the same thing when it comes to you and all of the other bloggers out there. And for goodness sake, if you want to be in publishing (even Web publishing), add a pitch policy to your blog if you’re that concerned about the number of pitches you receive. If you want us to make your job easier by sending you info to potentially break stories in your niche, then you need to do the same and make it very clear what you want, what you don’t, and how and when you want it (it’s not always obvious from simply reading someone’s blog - often they try to cover far too much to have a narrow target, they’ll cover one thing but bitch about something related being pitched, etc.).
It’s about time both sides on this issue extended a hand, called a truce, and actually tried to understand each other. I think we need a big group hug people.
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Comments
Completely agreed Joe. There’s no excuse for anyone to bitch about getting email if they’re putting their address out there publicly. Like it or not, that’s how it ends up spreading (whether you intend it to or not, and precisely what happened with Trapani’s address being added to a media contact database). And actually, in light of that fact, the smart thing would be for her to take some responsibility and not blame every PR person she didn’t like a pitch from, and instead focus the anger on the database where the address was listed without permission and to better protect her address moving forward.
Both sides have folks at fault. We have people who will pitch any crap they can to any blogger they can get their virtual hands on. The blogging community has a combination of folks who are either too green with publishing at all to know how to deal with PRs effectively and those with a bit too much self-importance, trying to tell us not only to pitch them like other journalists but also to make special rules and practices just for them. Such is life… and something I want to tackle in the next few days here… a bit of advice for those on both sides of the fence.
See that’s what happens when you drop press releases on paper. In the old days journalists would just bin ‘em without giving it a thought.
Doesn’t this really come back to “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?”
If someone creates an audience, they will get pitched. If they don’t want to receive irrelevant pitches then they need to either place keyword filters on their email or not allow their email addy to be public-facing. With the latter option, they will lose out on some relevant story leads, exclusives, etc. but if this is really causing so much grief, it is the only solution.
I hope it isn’t a revelation to anyone that people are buying and trading the contact information of large audience blog and mainstream media contacts. If it is made available in any form, consider it in the public domain (aka the wild).
Proclaiming to be a victim of others’ wrong-doing in these situations appears to be accomplishing more harm than good.