I’m not a big fan of traditional marketing pitches - too many of them are hot air packed in an email and few are better than most regular spam I guess, but I gather that’s how PR works.
The last few days saw an interesting discussion swell up among tech bloggers about how, where and when they want to get pitched to by the marketing crowd. Now in my ideal world, nobody would pitch anything to me and I could discover the news myself, but obviously, this isn’t going to happen.
Because the blog here got a little bit of traction lately, I’m starting to get a lot of PR pitches by email (”Story Idea: XXX” etc. - like I couldn’t come up with my own story ideas…). Most of them are so badly written, I would fail a Freshman English student for them and those that aren’t usually have little to do with what I write about here anyway.
But I’m not going to change the nature of PR anytime soon, so if somebody wants to pitch something to me, how should they do it?
I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick here: Just do what every blogger does already - have an RSS feed I can subscribe to.
Judging from this story on the Blog Herald, only one out of 25 PR firms has an RSS feed. That is simply dumb. Where do I spend most of my time? In my RSS reader. I don’t want to see a pitch in Twitter - that’s for personal interaction. If it’s email - I will probably ignore it.
Just let me subscribe to a feed of your pitches and not only do I see then while I’m looking for story ideas anyway, I am also in a reading mode as opposed to just scanning text at that point.
At that point, we can also drop the idea of fake personal engagement leveraged by automatically inserting my name into an email…
I’m also in agreement with Marshall and pitching via RSS. I usually forget about them if they’re emailed and lucky for me, I don’t get pitched via Twitter. If I were, they’d be blocked asap.
RSS is just so much more convenient and saves everyone a lot of time. I wonder why they’re so hesitant to jump on the RSS bandwagon…
Brilliant. Another benefit would be that they wouldn’t have to do any email harvesting — people would just sign up, and they’ll reach both the “big” subscribers and the startups/niche ones, too!