Last week Amber over at Altitude Branding wrote a Dear John letter to PR folks. I totally get it. She’s totally right. Basically, it was a bit of a rant (deservedly so) about her frustration about getting pitched by PR pros. The thing is she doesn’t do reviews in her blog and especially not for the types of products she’s getting pitched.
In the offline world this has long been one of my frustrations with PR pros. At my newspaper job I will get an email or phone call and usually the pitch is this: “Hi, our client is a local resident and they just (did this wonderful thing) and we were wondering if you’d do a story.” Then I get totally thrilled until I release it’s someone from a major metropolitan city 3 hours away. That’s not a local resident and if they did any research they’d find that our newspaper doesn’t have a coverage area that reaches that far out.
The problem is lack of research. This is why I often don’t recommend buying media lists if you are are running a DIY PR campaign. It’s really a waste of your time to blanket pitch journalists and bloggers. This is actually a good thing to know because you want to target your news to the media that can do something about it. The misguided pitches that make media bristle make them feel that way because it’s obvious you didn’t even bother to check out the publication or blog.
However most people, and PR folks, go for the media lists because you can blast out your message to tons of media with the theory being the more press releases sent out the more likely you are to get publicity. However, your odds are the same as the person who put in a little effort and identified 25 reporters/bloggers likely to publish their news.
So do the research. It will definitely be worth your while. You’ll gain exposure with less effort.