Changing Pitches For Changing Times
4/9/2009
By Jason Falls
I get excited when baseball season starts. A long-time, and thus long-suffering, Pittsburgh Pirates fan, I’m renewed and rejuvenated each April when the season starts anew and my team still has a few more weeks until they’re mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.
In many ways, social media has given public relations professionals a similar, golden opportunity for renewal. Journalists, like everyone else, are becoming more involved in social networks and familiar with the new media landscape. The medium offers us a new environment with which to communicate, and pitch. But the medium comes with some norms – not quite rules – we must respect to be effective there.
In my opinion, these norms have evolved because the public relations industry was lulled into laziness by technology. Fax blasts, e-mail marketing platforms and even the BCC field in a standard e-mail allowed us to distribute releases and information to hundreds or thousands of people without investing much time. Many of us forgot what the “R” in PR stands for and peppered as many contacts as possible with our “news” even though it probably wasn’t relevant to all of them.
Bloggers changed the dynamic. They not only were not lulled into tolerating the mass mail mentality like traditional media, they discovered they could combat it by publicly humiliating public relations pros who did it.
Good for them. Without that shock to our system, the public relations industry would still be spiraling down a path of journalists as numbers, not as people.
What the generally untrained new media outlets of bloggers did through public outings like Chris Andersons’s PR blacklist and Gina Trapani’s PR Spammers Wiki, is say, “You can’t come to the plate with the same ole lineup and expect to win more games this year.”
This wake up call led public relations professionals to take the time to learn the norms of the new media landscape which are, in general:
1. Journalists/bloggers are people. Treat them as such.
2. Journalists/bloggers have precious little time. Don’t waste it.
Keep in mind I have always advocated that we should treat bloggers no different than we treat journalists, only that we, as an industry in general, have not been treating journalists well. Bloggers have reminded us of the norms we’d forgotten.
So how to we tweak our approach to face opening day in the new media world with a better chance at success? How do we realign our roster and game plan to win? Here are some thoughts:
1. Do away with (most) mass communications
E-mail blasts and BCC approaches remove the personal relationship from the communication. Remember the first norm. Treat the media outlets like they are people, not numbers or just e-mail addresses.
Fair to say, however, that you can employ mass mailing techniques if the media members opt-in to them and can opt-out at anytime. But reaching out to them personally in your routine culling and manicuring of lists to ask their permission to be put on the blast list is imperative. Also keep in mind that if you publish your releases on your Web site, many bloggers and journalists would rather subscribe to your RSS feed than get an e-mail. Respect that wish as well and make the RSS feed easy to access.
2. Focus on quality over quantity
Perhaps this is personal preference, but I would rather have 20 influential media outlets and bloggers writing about my company than 400 who happen to not think the e-mail blast was spammy. A Brodeur and MarketWire survey last year showed 75 percent of journalists use blogs for story ideas. The Internet has lessened the chance, if not the importance, of having the “scoop.” By targeting the right outlets, not the right number of them, you’ll have more time to reach the right audiences and get good trickle down effect for your efforts.
3. Learn the art of the pre-pitch
This is the most important thing I’ve developed in my public relations career. I don’t pitch a media member unless or until I’ve asked them if they would be interested the topic of the pitch. By getting their permission to pitch them, my success rate in placing stories has always been high.
This can be as simple as e-mailing, “Hey Bob. A client has a new fitness product coming out next month for the boomer crowd. Would love to tell you about it or send some background info. Let me know if you’re interested.” If he responds with an affirmative, I’m in. If I see him at a luncheon a few days later, I might just ask, “Did you see my e-mail about the boomer fitness product? Can I tell you about it?”
Just like the e-mail lists, if you give the journalist the option to not listen to the pitch, they’ll be more receptive when they are interested.
Tech blogger Stowe Boyd took this one step further with his idea of the Twit Pitch – a pitch limited to the 140 characters allowed in communications on the social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter. If you want to pitch Stowe, you keep it short, to the point and let him respond if interested.
4. Focus on the relationship, not the release
I can’t tell you how many e-mails I get each week from junior level PR types hammering me with 10 paragraphs on whatever it is they’re pitching, then a copy-paste version of the press release with the closing line, “When can I set up an interview with our CEO this week?”
My main problem with this approach is I don’t know these people. These verbose e-mails are the first communications I’ve ever received from them. If someone sent me a note on Twitter or Facebook and asked me a question or two, established a line of communications, then asked if I’d be interested in a new thing their client had going, I would at least consider it. As it stands, I just hit delete.
This environment is the result of companies putting junior level account folks on the horn trying to get the press release in front of as many people as possible in a short amount of time. This leaves no room for relationship building. If you reach out and connect with the media member in a non-threatening, pitch-less manner, maintain a level of communications and build a relationship with them over time, they’ll listen when you do have something to pitch.
And for the record, I didn’t ask for the release and happen to think CEOs are the worst possible people to interview in most cases. Just sayin’.
It’s spring time again in the public relations industry. The new world of social media and the consumer-centric Web offers us renewed hope that we can win it all this time. By improving upon what we did right with traditional media in our last season and weeding out what we’ve done wrong, we can take on this new era of opportunity with the same kind of renewed enthusiasm baseball fans have each year.
Let’s just hope we wind up better than my poor Pirates.
Jason Falls is VP, Director of Interactive & On-Line Communications for Doe-Anderson, the House of Brand Enthusion, in Louisville, Ky. He is also an unapologetic Pittsburgh Pirates fan. Falls authors SocialMediaExplorer.com, one of the Advertising Age Power 150 marketing blogs.