Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson has decided to list every lazy PR person who spams his box with irrelevant messages. Listing folks from Edelman and Weber Shandwick he says:
Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching… The following is just the last month’s list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it–turnabout is fair play. There is no getting off this list. If you’re on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.
Here’s our take on this. We hold the belief that PR is probably the only marketing discipline that can keep up with the speed and dynamism of the social media. Advertising agencies spend too much time concentrating on campaigns that stretch over time to even cope with social media and digital agencies were set up to operate just like ad agencies - they can’t react minute by minute.
PR agencies have worked day-by-day with papers and magazines for a long time now but when it comes to social media they seem to have forgotten everything the learned - out with relationship building and subtle plays and in with an ad-agency style tool: spam.
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Nice take.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Nice take, and funny since I’ve been in an argument with some Canadian advertising and marketing people about the same issue (re: a recent post of mine).
October 30th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
hmmmm.. theoretically yup. but man, can someone introduce me to an enlightened pr guru? cause I haven’t met one yet.
October 30th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Having been both a journalist/blogger and pr (at Weber Shandwick as well…) I can testify that both sides are prone to bouts of absolute uselessness. It’s shocking, for example, how many times i’ve seen someone cut and paste most of a press release into an article (i’ve given up writing factual releases and now just write the article).
Another thought: why don’t PR agencies have digital news feeds that work nicely - ideally i’d like to just subscribe to something relevent to what i’m writing about.
Final thought i’ve worked with some great PRs that often know their clients industry better than the media and delight in being challenged on a release - there are good prs out there. Promise.
October 31st, 2007 at 3:14 am
I’ve been in the PR game and it’s tough. You’re always under pressure to work miracles for clients that really aren’t very newsworthy, so you fire off some longshots to people like the editor in chief of Wired. Sometimes it actually works, sometimes they subject you to public ridicule.
But journalists could not do their jobs without PR people feeding them information and pre-written copy. Sure, there are still some hard nosed old-school journalists out there. But mostly, they just run press releases.
Even in Wired.
October 31st, 2007 at 4:12 am
As a publicist…
Tailoring pitches only goes so far. I do my best to only send relevant releases to journalists, but its not a perfect science… nor should it be.
Chris argues that we should only send material to editors and journalist that reflect their sensibilities and taste. Over the years, i have learned that while the writers I work with stick within certain beats, that doesn’t always reflect their sensibilities. Most writers are still writing outside of their taste, or have a much wider splay of interests than their editors give them freedom to explore.
And why not push an editor’s/writer’s envelope? Isn’t the idea to expand and learn and introduce NEW idea’s and events and product and story to the reader? Not the already trampled parameters the writers/editors set for themselves? Should we not try to expand the narrow road some writers and editors traverse?
We as publicists also have an obligation to our clients to at least try and find the angle… to do our best to explore the outer rim of plausible placement. We also do not ALWAYS know what stories are in the pipeline and when a pitch we are servicing might be more relevant than expected…
…to be honest, some of my very best placements have come from sending out ’shot in the dark’ emails…. of which some would clearly have found me on Chris’s list for sending…
*shrugs*
October 31st, 2007 at 2:31 pm