360DigitalInfluence

I loved Stowe Boyd’s meme on “Twitchpitching.” He offers a complete set of instructions for how to use Twitter, his prefered “pitching” channel to reach him, here.

140 characters. Not in your Inbox. The pressure to keep it short, sweet and to the point.

Here’s an example of a reposted tweetpitch from his site:

“UpTake helps u make better travel decisions, powered by 20 mm travel opinions/reviews of edglings from 1000+ sites.”

While he does allow for links to be sent his way, if the story cannot be clearly teased in 140 characters, we have a problem in this new attention economy.

Best Practice “Reaching Out”

I think “pitching” bloggers is a bad idea. Not to get too hung up in semantics, the term “pitching” is an artifact of traditional media relations. While many “head-of-the-tail” bloggers like Stowe Boyd are savvy like traditional journalists or may be traditional journalists, those farther out along the tail may not be. Pitching is not as good as suggesting a great idea that aligns with who a blogger is and what they care about. I did not grow up doing media relations. I sit beside pros who did. And most of their ‘best practices’ are equally relevant to bloggers.

Still, we have to respect how things are constantly changing. Stowe likes Twitter. He also goes the extra mile to have a link - How To Pitch Me - at the top of his blog. It’s hard to miss. Hard to not pay attention to all his signals about how best to reach out to him. He makes a case for a more personal approach to the media relations side of PR that he calls MicroPR in a recent post. Apparently, Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, hates it when pitches - both good and bad - clutter up her personal email account. She has called out those offenders in a new wiki - prspammers. And for whatever someone at Ogilvy has done to earn a spot in your list - I am sorry.

We have a deep commitment to getting it right. We even wrote a Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics which we revise from time to time (look for the Twitter section soon) to protect our good relationships with bloggers - big and small. We are a big agency. And training everyone constantly and relentlessly is an imperfect process. We do have the most ambitious digital training program of any agency I know. I also teach graduate classes at Johns Hopkins University as I want to see the next generation of professionals walk in with an innate appreciation for digital public relations. Still it takes time and we will move ahead imperfectly.

Things are changing all of the time. I love the idea of “Twitpitching.” I hope we get it right most of the time. I have to believe our deep commitment in digital and in training will do more to help our agency live in perpetual beta than anything to help our people always reach for best practices.

Finally, I love the discussion about this - especially at the PR Open Mic site.

For your download and pleasure: blogger-outreach-code-of-ethics.pdf