I get bunches of pitches via email. I never really asked for them, but there they are. I understand. It’s the business you’re in.

They’re press releases, mostly, but sometimes a more personalized attempt at news or an event or a product promotion. Once in a while, I get a pitch that works or gets my attention. But by and large, I’m the wrong target for you.

You see, I don’t write about the kind of stuff you’re pitching. I don’t announce promotions, or analyze them, or talk about them. I don’t evaluate technology or applications. I don’t review products or talk about them much unless there’s a larger, more specific context that I’ve initiated.

If you’ve written to me or put me on your “pitch list” because I happen to be on the AdAge Power 150 or on some other very nice lists of awesome blogs, you’re making a big generalization that’s not helping you much. Just because I have a successful blog doesn’t mean I blog about what you hope I do. If you’ve browsed the posts here at all, you’ve probably gleaned that already.

In my specific case, your pitches and emails to me are wasted effort. I delete most of them, the press releases immediately. The personalized messages I indeed do read, but I’ve never written about one product promotion or event or campaign as a result of them. I’m okay with not being the first to know. There are other people out there that do that much better than I do.

I know there are bloggers out there that want your info, because they do want to be in the know. They consider their blog much more of a media outlet than I do, and themselves more in the framework of a journalist. I’m a writer, pretty much. A thinker sometimes, for better or worse. I’m not a very good promotional vehicle for things that don’t have personal relevance to me.

So by all means, keep up the blogger relations thing, because I’m sure it’s effective in other places. But me? You can take me off your list. You’re not going to get much traction here. It’s not what I do. That’s not what my blog is for, and it’s not what my readers come here for.

If all of that makes you want to break up with me, that’s okay. I’ll save you the trouble. I’ll read about your campaign on other people’s blogs and be happy that you found someone to cover your stuff.

My blog is an intellectual adventure for me, not a channel for you. I intend to keep it that way. And if ever an exception were to be made, it would be because it’s a topic, thing, or person I’m passionate about to start with.

But really, you can take me off your list and you don’t have to send me free stuff. You don’t need to put me on your rockstar blogger lists of influential people. Because really, the kind of “influence” I have – if it’s real – isn’t the kind you’re looking for. I won’t send legions of people into your stores or to your website. My purpose here is to mobilize and influence thought, not commerce. If that makes me a lousy blogger, I guess I’ll learn to live with that.

So I think we should part ways, but it’s okay. You’re doing the right thing, it’s just that I’m the wrong outlet. Really.

It’s not you. It’s me.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
A Dear John Letter to PR Folks

Writing a decent email pitch isn’t complicated. And I know some folks are looking for the Almighty Template (to you, I say sternly and a bit impatiently: quit looking for shortcuts and learn for yourself). But here’s my assessment of why this pitch worked, and a bit of a tricky bit at the end that is really the linchpin of the whole thing.

Concise

We all get tons of email. No one – I repeat, no one – wants to wade through a tome of paragraphs and prose. Send a nice intro, a quick summary, a few key details, and let the recipient ask for more information if they’re interested in it. If I’m interested, I WILL ask for more info. If I’m not, all the words in the world aren’t going to convince me otherwise.

Personal

Don’t you dare try to say “I love your blog” if you’ve read the last three posts and are attempting to feign interest. I don’t care if you love or even read my blog, and that’s not important to me if your pitch is good. What’s more important is that you’re friendly, personable, and interested in me and what I do, and the audience and community I serve. We’re all people here, and while we have jobs to do, it matters to me that we can talk to each other like humans and not “bloggers” and “PR people”.

Focused

Know exactly what you’re asking me to pay attention to, and point to it directly. In this case, it was a project, and it came with a quick summary of the purpose of the project and a link. Are you asking me to cover it on my blog? Tweet about it? Take some action of some kind? (This one actually will require a pretty significant commitment on my part if I do it). Be precise, and tell me exactly what you’re asking me to commit to so I can put it straight on my to-do list if I’m interested. Open ended means that I have to stash it to think about later, and even with the best intentions, that can sometimes mean it gets forgotten.

Relevant

And that means relevant to me not you. A little research can tell someone that I’m in the social media space as a community director for a software company, I have a daughter, I travel a lot, stuff like that. Any of those three categories is at least a starting place to see if your stuff lines up with my universe. And while I know you can’t read my mind, at least let me know what dots you connected, as in “I know you’re a mom, and we’re hoping that you might find something like this fun to do with your kids.” And hey, this is shocking, but if you’re in doubt about a fit, why not ask before you pitch?

Sticky Part: Interesting Project

This is what it ALL boils down to, guys. All the PR polish, best practices, and well-written pitches in the world will not do a damned thing if your project, product, or idea isn’t interesting. And that means interesting to other people. It’s really easy to convince ourselves that something is big news to US because we’re close to it, instead of looking at the news with some perspective.

I know it’s hard. I know you get saddled with crap from your clients that isn’t remotely newsworthy, yet you’re commanded to go out there and tell people about it anyway. Your job is to either find a way to make it interesting, or be brave enough to push back on your client and tell them why it isn’t. You’re paid to be an adviser and protector of the relationships you have with your media contacts, not just a lackey that follows direction blindly.

That also means that if “interesting” is relevant to just a small, niche group – like, say, buyers of specialized medical equipment – then guess what? That’s who you pitch. Even if there’s only 10 of them. And again, you have to teach your clients that no, Gary Vee is not likely to do a video about it, and that they should be fishing in the proper pond, no matter if it’s large or small. Volume doesn’t equal impact. If they’re not listening, or if you don’t understand that, maybe neither of you are ready to be doing this kind of outreach.

The Unteachables

All of these things require a bit of judgment and finesse, which isn’t really teachable, unfortunately. It’s about saying to yourself “If I were the blogger here, outside of my bias, would this get my attention and why?” Being honest with yourself about that as a HUMAN instead of just the media relations pro can help an awful lot.

And I teeter on the fence all the time about whether you can teach people and relationship skills. Can you teach someone to pen an email that’s friendly yet professional? I don’t know. I feel like many of the people I know that do it best just, well, do it. It’s just wired into the way they work. I know personally I never got “coached” about how to send an email to a donor prospect. I just knew what felt like the right tone and approach.

I believe you can teach nuance, style, all that mechanical stuff. But can you really teach intent? I’m not sure.

So Then.

Have I told you all the stuff you already know? And if so, why are so many folks still struggling with this? Or is this all revolutionary and new and not obvious? I’m really eager to understand the Quest for the Perfect Pitch and why it seems to go wrong so often. Big discussion I know, but what the heck.

Sound off.

image credit: JonathanRossi

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Pitch That Worked

I was, of course, the heretic brought in to talk social media and discuss some of the shifts happening in the business world. But I had a conversation afterward with a gentleman named Don Drews, who heads up a marketing consultancy called Courageous Marketing. He shared with me that he’s going back to school to get his PhD, because he wants to teach marketing. Awesome, I said.

But his question: with all that’s changing, what am I going to teach about marketing?

He’s shining a light on something that we don’t talk about much. We talk about how businesses are evolving, and I even talked a bit about how to hire for social media roles in companies. But how are we preparing the new marketers, the new communicators, for entering the business world as we’re now building it?

This is a hard question for me to answer if we’re comparing it to “traditional” marketing curriculum, because I didn’t focus on communications in school (I majored in music).  So I’d be hard pressed to come up with comparisons that are relative.

I do think we need to teach marketers some tenets of social media culture and implementation, including:

• How the balance shift in consumer voice impacts corporate presence online
• Why paying attention and listening is fundamental to social media success, period
• The realities of culture shift, and how they need to be the starting place for many organizations
• The importance of not sticking social media in the marketing silo, but seeding it organization-wide
• Why good branding still matters, and which parts of brand presence you control

Of course, that includes talk about the tactics and execution, but later. After we’ve established a bit of a foundation for the role of social media in business as a whole, right?

But here’s where I need you. These are some of the questions we need to answer:

• What elements of traditional marketing and communications will and should endure along side social media?
• What’s obsolete about our teaching of marketing to date, and how do we evolve it?
• What should we be teaching marketers about social media, irrespective of the tools themselves?
• If you had new minds to shape about the landscape of communications in business as it will look five years from now, what would you want them to come away knowing, believing, and equipped to implement?

Let’s talk about this. This is the seed of some potentially big ideas. What say you?

image by James Sarmiento

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
What The Next Generation Needs To Know