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I get daily pitches from PR people. Most of them are dumb, and I should know, since I started out in the PR world pretty dumb myself. Granted, those were the days when a word processor was the guy sitting at a Wang with a three-day input backlog, but I figured out over time what constituted a smart pitch, and I think those qualities are as true today as they were back in the Dark Ages.
Here's a brief recap:
Understand Your Customer: Anybody who rants on the web has a POV that can be discovered with 10 minutes of Internet search. Yet I'm amazed that most of the pitches I get have no connection to anything I've ever written, let alone thought or cared about. "I know you write about marketing..." doesn't make the cut. Making the effort to show how the story fits into the context of a journalist's interests is probably as important as the substance of the pitch itself.
Coverage Of Your Competitors Doesn't Count: If I've written about, say, a toenail clipper, I can all but guarantee that a competing brand will pitch me the next day. Now, I understand that PR people get dinged when a story runs that could conceivably have been about their client or employer. But unless I focus exclusively on the toenail clipper world, I'm not writing again about it anytime soon, if ever. Chasing yesterday's news is dumb unless you have something truly new and important to say, which never happens.
Reacquaint Yourself With The Definition of News: The fact that you're announcing a three-gigawatt improvement in your flux capacitor might be earth-shatteringly important to your engineers, but it's not inherently meaningful to the rest of the world. If you want somebody to write about it, figure out if (and how) it's truly bigger, better, or otherwise different, and make sure you figure out why it's relevant. And, just for the record, if your app can't read minds or accurately predict the future, it's not newsworthy, no matter what you come up with.
Throwing Stuff Against The Wall Isn't A Strategy: If all PR people are doing is spamming the world with generic announcements and waiting for replies, sooner or later they're going to get replaced by machines. The real challenge is to translate the stuff, and that means if a story couldn't hold up in a 10-second live telephone pitch, nobody is going to pay attention to it in an email. And I have yet to see an email campaign customized enough to seem truly personalized, so the faux chummy stuff doesn't take the place of real substance.
Just Say No: PR people have it tough, just like their cousins in marketing. Companies routinely want to get credit for doing stuff that doesn't deserve or warrant it. So they usually have two choices: Either assume they're smart enough to spin stuff past journalists and bloggers and get away with it time after time, or have the guts to push back and get better stories. The truth is that we're all about equally smart, or dumb, so there's no choice. PR folks need to be a lot less accommodating, and a lot more (and more loudly) realistic.
Everyone wants to be a strategist and not a doer, since the former pays better and the latter risks repeat rejection. That's why it's usually the junior staff doing the dirty work. But without pitching, PR has no reason to exist, so I'd argue that these folks are the most important people on the team. They deserve better training, leadership that demonstrates by example how to truly engage with individuals and constituencies, and career counseling that lets them know that pitching skills are lifelong assets. The world doesn't need more kids aspiring to sit in darkened conference rooms riffing about media trends.
The smartest, most successful PR people know how to demand and then craft truthful, meaningful messages, study the marketplace for that content (context and targets), and then connect the two...and they realize that the act of connecting is a sales activity, however outdated and unsexy that idea may seem. Like I said, I'm continually amazed at how little this truth gets shared with the people doing the pitching, whether a junior and somewhat clueless version of yours truly, or the young professionals doing the same work today. But it's the only way to be effective.
Thinking otherwise is just dumb.
