I don;t think social media has made pr lazier, I think it has exposed the laziness to more people. The “mass email merge” pitches, which should be gone-gone-gone, are still here, apparently. The people who don’t read the publications before pitching them. Those who can’t discover (in your case, it’s not toooo difficult) that “CC” is a dude. Even the grayer area of lumping mommies and daddies (but not calling it “parenting” – back to research, anyone should know that’s a sore spot for you).

Blame? not the folks who pitch you, necessarily- but the managers who are making them pitch out to everyone under the sun, emphasizing numbers over quality and not giving people the training to know and the breathing room to do the proper research. I’ve seen that way too many times- and it has nothing to do with social media.

I agree with a number of the other commenters. I remember seeing this sort of sloppiness 20 years ago. Some people do as little work as possible. It doesn’t speak very highly of their work ethic but…

The problem is that just like nuking some dinner, it isn’t quite the same as
cooking a fine meal.

It may not be the perfect analogy but it is the first one that came to mind.

Any time you cut corners you have the chance of it not turning out great.
There are some awesome tools out there to assist with the research and I
really hope someone makes some even better ones, but at least in this case
it still takes a lot of human interaction. Clients think it is magic.
Agencies chase the $$$. It is a vicious circle.

I don’t know what it’s like at other agencies, but FH always took training and professional development very seriously. I think it shows.

C.C. –great post. I’ve railed about laziness in PR myself, although my rant was about the tendency to beg for tools to do the work for them (Justin’s Klout example). What causes this? Is it a training failure, or are people cutting corners because they are stretched for time? Are clients balking at the time and billable hours it takes to do things right? I’m truly mystified.

No one likes when this happens and only bitching about it helps no one. That
is why I sincerely wrote them back and shared this link. I got nice replies
from both of them so hopefully it helped a bit.

What I mostly wanted to do was thank you for actually replying to the people sending you these messages. They won’t learn unless their mistakes are pointed out. Whether it was laziness or a genuine error (which happens to everyone), I’m sure they appreciated having their mistake pointed out to them so they can avoid it in the future. Some people would rather post this blog entry and complain about it rather than doing anything – something I think is almost as annoying as receiving this kind of mail in the first place.

So thanks for letting the senders know of their mistake – whether it’s your job or not, you’re helping to cut down on these kind of e-blasts and doing some teaching along the way – something I think everyone on this forum can appreciate.

Your statement of “They don’t understand that social media means that PR has to work harder than ever before because we know SO much more about bloggers and influencers because you/they actually TELL us.” is so dead on correct that I wish I had a way to highlight it for the world to see.

There are most certainly agencies out there doing it right, but at least from my experience is it the minority. For every one properly done outreach I get, there are easily 25 or more that are horrible. I can’t wait till that shifts.

I also think a lot of it is a common sense and manners issue. Somehow people in general have lost these things.

I think you forgot the unicorn sticker.

Here’s the thing: this is *not* a new problem (as folks state below) and there will always be people who don’t understand that every (mommy?) blogger is not interested in the same thing. They don’t understand that social media means that PR has to work harder than ever before because we know SO much more about bloggers and influencers because you/they actually TELL us. They don’t understand that, if we do our job right, we should be engaging with 3 or 4 folks who make the most sense for our clients or projects vs. spamming 100 -200 and hoping someone will spend time trying to find the relevance in a form letter.

But, there *are* PR people who truly understand how to engage and interact with bloggers, reporters and influencers. Maybe it’s because they have been paying attention to how the industry has shifted. Maybe it’s because they’ve taken the time to build solid relationships. Maybe it’s because of the training they’ve received from their agencies. Or maybe they simply have common sense. Whatever it is, I’d love to see posts that generate this many comments about PR people who are working hard and who get it. It’s obvious that, as an industry, we have some work to do before this happens.

Whatever level is doing the work I think a big problem too is that there
isn’t enough value or training placed on making sure it is done right.

Isn’t it great when your child does that? I had it happen recently and I
couldn’t stop smiling.

It’s not a social media problem, it’s a performance problem. Too many firms trust junior staff (not that there aren’t rock stars among young staff) to execute without supervision. The recession hit PR firms too, and as a result, work that was once handled by mid-level (e.g. experienced) staff is pushed to junior or intern staff. Quality control is easy to ignore but the ramifications of doing so are obvious, from your to those on Bad Pitch blog to so many others.

The real impact of social media is that it has eliminated the grace of longer form communication. At least when I see my kid write 10 paragraphs for an essay that requires a minimum of four, I have hope that the written word still has some life left in it.

I get relevant, human pitches all the time and when they come in they are a
VERY welcomed addition to my inbox.

Keep up the good work.

You also raise a VERY valid point about it being hard to find out exactly
what people are interested in. As someone who has done the research for
campaigns I know how hard this can be. I like your idea about actually
reaching out and that sucks that not more responded. Probably some got lost
in the deluge of e-mail, but some others might have been ignored. Have you
ever tried reaching out again? Not nagging, but double checking?

I like the approach.

Glad it is keeping you in business though! *hugs*

My resume speaks for itself. Me and teams I’ve worked on have run campaigns
for everyone from Coke, to Warner Brothers, to HBO and Snapple. I’ve run
more outreach campaigns then I care to remember so when I write something
like this I speak from the experience of being paid a lot of money to make
sure that clients get what they ask for.

So I’m not just spouting, but rather trying to help people do better work.
Sorry you can’t see the difference.

Thanks for coming to our book reading at SXSW. Sorry you didn’t like the
approach, but we liked it better then reading from the book for 10 minutes
and THEN answering questions as we were instructed to.

Hope next time you can grow a pair of balls and actually post as yourself
rather then hiding behind your snark.

Happy Wednesday to ya!

I work for Proximity BBDO. Let me add that I agree with your post, and there are many examples of lazy Ad and PR people out there. They are not all bad, and this is still an emerging medium.

Dude… you need to stop trolling and start contributing. We all know you have written a book. But what have you ACTUALLY done beyond position yourself as an expert?

Any dude can start a blog and spew obvious shit from every direction. Time to pony up… what have you actually achieved, or what do you plan on achieving?

yours,
Anonymous on Madison Ave.

On the other hand, thank God for crappy PR practitioners. It means I’ll always have people coming to me to fix what someone else has royally screwed. Thanks for the post, CC!

I’m not sure I would blame social media though. People were blasting out news releases to indiscriminate media lists long by fax and even mail, before social media came along. Anyone who has something to sell, whether it’s consulting services or a PR pitch, needs to take the time to research their audience, identify who might be interested and why and how each person likes to receive information and then get in touch with them on a personal level with a targeted pitch. If this means, 25 separate e-mails then so be it. Yes, it takes a lot more time but it’s about building relationships over the long-term. This philosophy needs to be set from the top-down.

Having said that, I have one caveat. When new media bloggers come on the scene, it’s really hard to do this research and find out what they’re interested in and how they want to receive it, if they don’t respond to an initial outreach. As part of the research you speak of, we sent many e-mails or posts to new bloggers introducing ourselves and the clients we represent and asking if they would be interested in receiving more information and their preferred method of receiving it. In many cases we got no response.

C.C. – I’m sure you’re aware of this, but there are many of us who are putting in the time and effort to research blogs/media outlets thoroughly and to send relevant story ideas. This isn’t an excuse by any means, but sadly the tools to find and vet relevant bloggers/media are severely lacking (which is why I’m thrilled about David Spinks’ BlogDash). So that requires more digging and research, which those of us who are concerned about doing things right will gladly do. The lazy ones will continue to send the type of pitches you received.

All we can do is continue educating PR pros about the right way to reach out to bloggers and media. I appreciate when bloggers like yourself share the bad pitches because it teaches a good lesson to less experienced pros who read your blog. But like Amber said, the ones who really need to be reading this probably aren’t.

We have a three-pronged influencer outreach process that includes reach, relevancy and tone. It absolutely includes manual research and personalized pitches. That is non-negotiable. It absolutely does NOT include mail merges and irrelevant pitching. We are trying to build relationships here.

There are a lot of folks doing PR the way you indicated above, so I’m glad you wrote this post. Because those people absolutely need to be called out. I know my end goal as a communicator is to be a strategic counselor for my clients. And there is nothing strategic at all bout an e-mail blast or mail merge in most cases.

Cheers, Justin.

Business when done right has always been about relationships and treating
others with respect. If an agency can’t show people the basic respect of
sending them a personal e-mail, then why in the world will we even take the
time to pay attention to what they are pitching us.