Joho the Blog
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June 26, 2003
I received an email today from a "boutique" PR firm asking me if I'd be interested in writing about one of their clients, a company that provides enterprise IM. The email msg was personalized to the extent that it had my name and my weblog's name at the top of it. The product seems not particularly interesting and the pitch is rather naive - I'm not really going to get excited because people can IM with other team members when they're on a conference call with a client - but I am curious about whether we're being spammed. Did you get this pitch today, too? If so, maybe we can do something to help educate the PR firm; I don't want to be at the receiving end of their pitches and press releases. I heard back from the PR guy who sent it to me. They went through MediaMap and sent the pitch to about 25 bloggers and 100 media outlets. "To my delight, I have received several positive responses which should result in some great coverage for our client. Yes, the idea of IM is nothing new, but in the context of a real live application story and how a real business uses it, I thought it would be of interest." I wonder why. Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 26, 2003 09:34 AM
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Comments
I read blogs, I think about how ActiveWords might work for the blogger, then I fashion a pitch.
That said, I have canned ActiveWords text substituion paragraphs that I include.
I am not sure as to how in the world I would get this done with out this facility. If you get a pitch that doesn't show you that the sender has read a least one or more entrys, seeking to understand your "voice", it's spam.
Buzz
Posted by: Buzz Bruggeman | June 26, 2003 10:59 AM
What's the problem, David? Part of being a technology writer is getting pitched by PR firms. Pitches run the gamut from clueless to subtle and sophisticated. You can't filter them out entirely unless you want to close off a potentially valuable source of information. That would be like going to a conference and refusing to talk to anyone who you hadn't already met. But then, even at a conference, your friends are likely to pitch you ... though it may be disguised as a friendly conversation ... .
Posted by: Dylan Tweney | June 26, 2003 11:21 AM
As a flack I don't see anything wrong with this. If blogging is a form of journalism, (and it waddles like journalism and quacks like journalism) then I seen no reason why flacks should not pitch stories.
It is not always obvious from reading a journalist, print or blogger, to know what would be interesting.
Posted by: Alice Marshall | June 26, 2003 02:32 PM
Dylan, there's nothing wrong-er about getting pitched by a clueless PR agency than there is about getting spammed. But I'd recommend that rather than "pitching" they write something interesting and let us link to it if we want. That is, I personally would prefer a msg that said "I just wrote something about enterprise IM on my blog. Wanna take a look?"
But, you're right, it's not a big deal. I'm more interested in this as a sign of how Marketing is figuring out how the blogosphere can help.
Posted by: dweinberger | June 26, 2003 04:06 PM
I've had a couple similar approaches in the past. The way I see it, if someone actually takes the time to read my blog or presue my web site, and comments or crafts their pitch accordingly...well that's a good thing. I welcome that.
Unsolicited drivel is something I go to great lengths to combat. People who auto-crawl a website for email addresses and then spam every address with garbage are vermin. But people who work in PR, sales, or marketing who make a genuine effort to understand my services or viewpoint are something I'd like more of.
My two cents. Worth each and every penny.
Posted by: Ken Camp | June 26, 2003 04:25 PM
I've been getting a few of these sort of emails of late too...not sure how to respond to them....
Posted by: Darren | June 26, 2003 09:13 PM