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Right and Wrong of PR Pitches

Guest post by: John Jantsch

Article Overview: For years I was on the pitching end of PR and, while I still do some for my own promotion, I am more often on the receiving end of pitches these days.

Right and Wrong of PR Pitches

For years I was on the pitching end of PR and, while I still do some for my own promotion, I am more often on the receiving end of pitches these days. It's probably foolish to suggest there is one right way and one wrong way for a PR person, marketer or business owner to do anything, but I know there are solid ways to get my attention and equally solid ways to convince me you are not really that into me covering your story.

I'll relate a recent engagement with an internal PR professional as an illustration of what I think is a very good way for businesses to approach the practice media relations. Warning: This is the long-term, thoughtful approach and takes some work.

Before I continue I will admit that the lessons in what follows are PR101 obvious for many, but I'm just here to tell you that experience demonstrates I need to share this.

I wrote a blog post recently on the subject of local search directories. In that post I mentioned about six of these directories by name. The post was pretty generic and all positive. Within a few hours I received an email from Chantelle Karl the Public Relations Manager for Yelp, one of the organizations I mentioned. First PR lesson - track, filter, and engage brand mentions.

Her email simply provided deeper and additional information related to the subject I had covered and showed me where I could find more if I desired. There was no pitch or press release involved. PR Lesson - show that you can be a resource of relevant information.

Yelp is a major player in this growing industry and the information she sent revealed some interesting stuff that I did not know, so I reached out and asked for an interview. Karl wrote back with a contact that was appropriate and we scheduled the interview for the Duct Tape podcast. PR (life) Lesson - be responsive and build relationships

On the day of the interview she confirmed that I had everything I needed and she got out of the way. I can't tell you how many PR firms still think it's their job to manage the conversation. Minutes after the interview I received an email with a list of fast facts about Yelp. As a writer, this is exactly the kind of information that I can use to quickly add flavor to the article I was working on. If I want the entire company history I probably know where to find to it, but boiling it down for me into snack sized snippets is a great way to be useful to the journalist. PR Lesson - understand what a journalist really needs and how you can make their life easier.

Today's post is not an attempt to bash the PR industry, far from it. Thankfully I can recount many stories like the one above, but I could also cite the opposite. Today's business owner and marketer must employ PR as a major leg of lead generation and these lessons apply no matter what your job title.

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Article Tags: business owner, chantelle, duct tape, email, illustration, interesting stuff, local search, marketer, media relations, pitch, pitches, pr firms, pr person, pr professional, press release, public relations manager, search directories, thoughtful approach, wrong way, yelp



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