From The Bulldog Reporter

PR Pitching Faux Pas

PR Spam Canned: Wired's Anderson Backs Lazy Flacks Post, Attacks Spray N' Pray PR

By Brian Pittman

As reported here, in The New York Times, PR Newser and much of the PR echo chamber online over the last weeks, Wired magazine Editor in Chief Chris Anderson generated a minor furor—and a lot of traffic for his Long Tail blog—when he posted an Oct. 29 rebuke of the "lazy flacks" who flood his inbox with untargeted pitches, releases and other PR communiqués.

"I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam. It's PR people," he wrote. Anderson then posted the email addresses of over 300 unsolicited "PR spam" pitches he'd received (from agencies such as Edelman, 5W Public Relations, Fleishman-Hillard, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Weber Shandwick and others), stating they'd been blocked. In the aftermath, many in marketing and communications called his posting of those emails out of bounds.

We checked in with him to get his response to these claims and to ask him how our readers might keep the love alive with the media—instead of invoking its ire. Our exclusive interview:

Were you surprised you touched such a sensitive nerve with your post?

I was surprised by the volume of responses, not that I had actually touched a nerve. Let me put it this way: I am often surprised and disappointed that most of what I write doesn't get more people talking—that's what I do. So, in that sense, this one achieved what I set out to do: drive conversation. It just got bigger and bigger. We're now at 400 comments, and thousands of external links. The New York Times wrote about it and now the trades are, too. It has become a model of the form. I am trying to build conversation. The technique I used is this: I articulated a thesis and problem, and then called attention to it with a partly provocative act [posting of the emails]. In that light, it was effective.

What's your response to claims like Bratton's that posting the emails was mean spirited?

You could argue it was uncivil, ungenerous and unfair—there's truth to that, maybe. But it was effective in getting people to focus on a real problem: The emails aren't appropriate and they're going to the wrong person. Nobody should ever call me and send me anything; I'm not a person to pitch. People who said there was a more generous and nice way to respond, like writing them individually, well … they're right. That would have been nicer, but also impossible for me to do. More important: It wouldn't have changed the game. It wouldn't have focused people on this issue. So, I guess I have to say, "Guilty as charged." The goal wasn't to be nice.

Do you think email is over-used as a media relations tool?

You know, I have no problem with email. A lot of people drew the wrong conclusions from my post—that I wanted phone calls, relationship building with PR or to meet at lunches. I don't want that. I just want people to understand my interests. Read my publication! And realize that I am not the inbox for the publication. I just want people to take a moment and think about who I am and what I want before hitting send. Email is fine. The problem is not thinking, "Who is this person and what would be meaningful to him?"

What media pitching tips in general can you share with our readers?

Fundamentally, I have trouble with the word "pitch." What I want, again, is people who understand my interests. In my case, I'm not a journalist. I shouldn't be getting pitches. But for reporters in general, do your homework. It's as simple as that.

There's a huge paradox in PR: The PR cycle of releases and emails is driven by the client. But the receptivity cycle is driven by whatever journalists are intellectually interested in, assigned to cover or pursuing. So the truth is this: If I'm expressing interest in open source software and you can see that in my stories or blog, then you could send a note acknowledging that.

The best email ever would be something like, "I saw your post and thought my client is a perfect example of it." That's not driven by the client or a release. It's driven by serendipity—your spotting my interest because of your research. I would love it if we saw more of that kind of thing, but it rarely happens. More often, it's just a release that has nothing to do with what we're about and that is driven by you, the PR person. The odds of that intersecting with our needs or interests is so low that it's spam. Email should be targeted and personal.

I can't remember the last time a random press release was useful. But there have been loads of times that somebody spotted a post and found synergy or made a connection and put a release at the bottom of their email because it was a fit. That's fine—but spray and pray doesn't work.

Can you think of a PR person or agency who "does it right"?

I am not going to answer that question. It's not that they don't exist. I have had great experiences with PR people I like. But it's just been so long since I've been a day-to-day journalist.

That said, let me make one thing clear: Condé Nast employs hundreds of PR people. I have PR people on my own staff. We believe in PR. We spend a lot of money on it. Some of our best employees' functions are driven by PR. In fact, we're changing the game internally here by using what we're calling PR 2.0 to train staff to do their own marketing and outreach for their work and stories.

What does that mean—your editorial staff is actively promoting the brand?

Our product is articles. It's the magazine and the website. When those articles come out, we want them noticed and we bring them to the attention of relevant people. On any given month, we publish thousands of articles. Our PR people have no idea who the right audience is for every single article. That's impossible. The only people with that knowledge are the authors of the articles themselves. So the people involved in the creation of the product are often in the best position to find the right audience—but they're not necessarily trained in PR or happy to do it. Perhaps they feel that self promotion is unseemly or that it's not their job. But we're telling them it is their job—we're training our writers and editors to market their stories.

They know who should get the emails and notices because it's peer to peer. They're in those communities. They understand the audience's interests and how they want to be talked to. This is, really, the best way to market in the new media era. In fact, I would love our PR people over time to stop doing traditional and widely distributed PR in favor of using social media and more community-focused tools or ideas to reach their targeted audiences.

Basically, we're practicing what we preach here at Wired. We're walking the talk. Alexandra Constantinople, our head of PR, who was formerly with GE, is tasked with doing this here. It's a big job and a big change, but it works. There are lessons for the PR industry in general in what we're doing here, I think.

What are your final tips for building better media relationships—beyond pitching?

Read it. Freakin' read what you're pitching to. I shouldn't even have to say that. Why don't more PR people do it? The reason pitches are inappropriate is because making them work requires reading and a real interest in the industry you're promoting. You have to care about it. We all want emails from people who really understand what we do, why we do it, and who are sophisticated about their own industries and who can speak the language. So, I guess the tip here is to really consume the press in your areas.

I don't think you'll ever get a 23-year-old communications major able to talk to me about my robotics interest in the same way as the engineer who created the product. So another major tip here or area of focus for PR people should be coaching the guy in the know and plugged into the development process on how to reach out to me himself—not some entry-level PR person who doesn't even get the product. This is facilitating, not gatekeeping. If this is the only thing we can change about PR in our lifetime, it would be enough.

How do the concepts in your book "The Long Tail" play into this?

It's all about the fragmentation of markets and the shift away from mass market products to millions of niche products. It's exactly the same for the media and PR. It's not about reaching everybody through The New York Times now. Instead, it's about seven million blogs and learning to communicate with those fragmented audiences or communities. Traditional PR is oriented around mass media. The new era is about niche media. That is PR 2.0. It's also "Long Tail PR." We're releasing a new version of the book, called "The Longer Tail," in January. It will include a new chapter about long tail marketing, which also impacts PR.

Labels: PR Tips