I’ve commented on this before, but it’s a topic worth visiting again: I love reading blogs from journalists who post all the horrible PR pitches they get every day. Not only are these sites great for a laugh, but they help me do my job better. Today I read a blog called PR Flack, where bloggers post their email responses to horrible pitches sent to them by PR “professionals”. Here are some of the posts I found:
– Thanks for your pitch, the one that started “Dear Friendly Blogger.”Actually, I’m decidedly unfriendly when flaky PR people can’t be troubled to look up my name or figure out if I write about “food and/or healthy living”. It’s not hard to personalize a pitch, but I suppose that would be too much … work?
– You may want to consider having someone in the office proofread emails like this before they go out. The message you sent has quite a few typos and grammatical errors — things reporters and bloggers consider when determining a product’s credibility.
– An embargo on hot story is OK with lead time to prepare, but handing it to me at 5pm with an 8am expiration is pointless.
– We’re insanely curious whether you’re actually affiliated with the brand you contacted us about — perhaps you’re an overzealous fan engaged in some sort of guerrilla campaign? Your omigod Valley Girl syntax and loose grasp of proper style — why is “belvedere” lowercase but “Sake” capitalized? — make us wonder whether you’re legit, as does the fact that you’re contacting us from your personal Gmail account.
– Thanks for your kind suggestion that we share your pitch about the America’s Best Restroom Awards with our “online audience”. As you might imagine, our readers are not interested in discussions of toilets, award-winning or otherwise, on our food blog.
These are just a few examples that I could actually repeat. There are many that are much more vulgar, and even threaten violence! These bloggers mean business. You really don’t want to be one of the publicists who sent the pitches that resulted in the above responses. Not only will bloggers refuse to work with you, they will circulate your bad pitch to other bloggers so they too will ignore you in the future. I’ve even found out that some bloggers will notify your client or your boss about your lacking PR skills.
It is possible to have a great relationship with a blogger. It’s just a matter of doing your job properly– peruse their website a little, learn about the stories they’ve recently written and what topics they like to cover. My work with a few food bloggers has resulted in good placements for our clients, as well as a valuable post for the blogger’s website such as this recent post on Shape.com. It’s a win-win, and keeps the door open for more collaboration down the road.
