As the one receiving numerous pitches for This Mommy Gig, I'm appalled at the number of pitches I get addressed to the wrong person or without at all. On Friday I received 25 emails, all to the same email address, all with different Dear ____________ names…..one for each writer on our site. Now, this has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a blogger, it has to do with the fact that the person sending those emails did NOT take the time to think about the fact that 25 emails sent to the same address would, in fact, all arrive in the same inbox. Regardless of what product she was pitching, I didn't take the time to find out because it irritated me so much that this supposed professional was obviously not pitching ME, she was pitching the IDEA of me. She wanted a blogger, supposedly the “it” thing.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for making this about the most important thing – people and the relationships involved in quality PR.

http://tinyurl.com/5prdtb

I hope to be more a part of PR 2.0.

P.S. Your blip.tv link doesn’t work.

Joel – some bloggers may want to write about products, companies or people because they believe what they discover would be of interest and/or resourceful to their readers. Sometimes PR helps unearth new things. But bad, off-topic pitches only waste your time and turn you off, so the next time that PR executive might have something that actually is of interest to you, you have probably stopped listening to them – and that’s unfortunate for them.

David, you make some really good comments here about bloggers and their ability to be a bit more free wielding with their thoughts. I agree that it’s an important evolution – the PR industry must improve – and if bloggers can help make that happen, I’m all for it. I’m just not sure I’m a fan of some of the approaches – like calling out individual names, for example.

I hope in the end, PR executives will heed this lesson: Take the time to do it right and do it better – and help educate clients that it’s the quality that counts…. although I’m afraid that’s a long time coming.

As you pointed out, I believe the challenge is that many clients care more about quantity than they do quality. The only PR stat many CEOs or board members look at is total number of impressions (circulation, audience, readers, etc.). They base their perception on successful PR on that one little (or big) number. So clients want to see massive call reports and the bigger the better. They want as many emails sent and phone calls made as possible within each hour. That approach doesn’t give the account team time to research the people they’re pitching, much less build relationships.

Our industry jokes about “smile and dial,” but that’s one of the reasons we get a bad rap among reporters. We’re doing the same with email blasts when we “spray and pray.” The difference – and it’s a big difference – is that managing editors aren’t going to give up precious editorial space for a reporter to vent about bad PR pitches. Bloggers, on the other hand, have much more liberty to draft a negative post to vent their frustrations. I hope that difference helps speed the transition to a focus on relationship-building within the PR industry.

[disclosure: some of the words above are from a blog post I wrote on this topic recently. they're relevant here and, just to clarify, still my words.]

Joel – just want to make sure I understand your comment. You only write posts out of PR pitches from people who are willing to pay you? Is that accurate?

If that’s the case, I’d say PR people should stop emailing you and let their colleagues in media buying drop you a line. Out of curiosity, does that bias what you write about, focusing on who has money to pay instead of who has worthy things to talk about?

Mel – common sense – of course! Excellent point…although I hate to admit that the longer I am in business the less common sense I see; seems it takes a long time for some people to really learn it.

As the one receiving numerous pitches for This Mommy Gig, I’m appalled at the number of pitches I get addressed to the wrong person or without at all. On Friday I received 25 emails, all to the same email address, all with different Dear ____________ names…..one for each writer on our site. Now, this has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a blogger, it has to do with the fact that the person sending those emails did NOT take the time to think about the fact that 25 emails sent to the same address would, in fact, all arrive in the same inbox. Regardless of what product she was pitching, I didn’t take the time to find out because it irritated me so much that this supposed professional was obviously not pitching ME, she was pitching the IDEA of me. She wanted a blogger, supposedly the “it” thing.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for making this about the most important thing – people and the relationships involved in quality PR.