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December 6, 2005Don’t get bitten by the Rat
Chuck Tanowitz writes about the problem of having the time to carefully reading blogger’s and journalist’s writings before contacting them in his recent post, “The Rats Nest.� If you don’t take the time to read a post as a PR or marketing person, then when you contact a journalist and pitch a story that’s inappropriate or already been written about by the author, you will actually waste your time and the writers. While it takes so much time to conduct research, you actually save time and money for your client’s if you take the time to conduct the research first. It’s tough to do, but it’s imperative especially in today’s world of blogs to read a blogger’s writings. Sending a bad story to a blogger can have far worse consequences then sending a poor story to a journalist, the worse a journalist will do is not print the story and take you off their email list. While a blogger can heavily criticize both the PR professional and the client for the pitch, if the blogsphere is a maze as Chuck suggests, then watch out as you might get bitten by a rat!
Posted by johncass at December 6, 2005 10:21 PM
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After some discussion on this post, here's an update.
The point of my post was to lay out some of the consequences of sending a story to someone you have not read. Basically don't bother sending a story if you have not read their material. I suppose the calculation for media relations people is to give an estimate of what results they will see from the a journalist or blogger writing about them. For blogging its a little easier, as you can measure the relative value of a website by the number of links are linking to a site.
Posted by: John cass at December 7, 2005 12:45 PM
