Backtrack, to the bit where you send out a press release. I’m a freelancer, inc for Tech Guardian, and I don’t read releases unless they have info on a product I’m reviewing. I’m a freelancer, not a newsdesk, and I’m not interested in announcements. Of the many, many press releases I get, I probably bin 95% without opening them. The other 5% I skim, then bin.

And I have never used a press release as the basis for a pitch to Charles or to any other editor, because if it’s gone to everyone else it would be like asking people to pay me for copies of Metro. I am only interested in PR mail if it is targeted to me, from a PR with an idea they know I would be interested in.

Those of you decrying journalists who don’t read releases – do you know how many we get? We get deluged, and sometimes we miss emails we actually need to read because they’re hidden among so much other stuff. Put it this way: imagine you do PR for, I dunno, a novelist. You like being contacted by journalists who want to write about your novelist. But every day, you get a steady stream of emails from journalists saying they are writing articles about poets, screenwriters, holiday destinations, cat flaps, knitting needles, forensic psychology, MP3 players, teabags, art galleries, hiking boots, clocks… are you interested?

That is what it is like. And that is why most of it goes straight to my trash folder.

This is why the idea of getting a 140-character message where there is no subject line and no scope to send 15 unsolicited attachments (not an exaggeration, it happens) sounds lovely.

This means that they’re not listening to anything I say. And I can’t get in touch with them directly, which I believe is the only appropriate way for some types of story (e.g. about forthcoming announcements).

In a sneaky way I like the idea of telling the press that the only way they can contact me is through Twitter. Then they have to follow me if they need info – and voila, I have my direct channel of communication back

Cheers,

Steve

Isn’t that why there’s the likes of Gorkana? I mean it tells you about everyone who is interested in a certain area. I think as well that with staffing levels being cut back – and increasing pressure to deliver ROI – there’s more and more pressure to deliver ROI.

However, Twitter can be a great way to build and maintain relationships with journalists. I don’t have a PR background (my background is marketing), but I have worked on blogger outreach campaigns and have ran a corporate blog. And whilst Twitter itself did not provide me with a way to pitch to journalist or bloggers, it did help me build a relationship with them which resulted in placement of articles for the clients I worked for.

Like Anna says, sending your message en masse might get you placement with a few, but will also piss up a number of people for being irrelevantly targeted. Target the right people and you’ll get better results and build relationships for the long term. It might take a bit longer, but it will get you the best results in the long term.

It saddens me that PRs still aren’t targeting their releases at those that would be interested. I’m about to move back in to the PR industry and don’t want to be made to cold call journalists that I know won’t be interested. It’s detrimental to the company I represent and my relationship with the journalist.

I completely understand that Charles doesn’t want to be bombarded with irrelevant info but I’m not convinced that Twitter is the way to manage that. PRs need to work with their clients to aid their understanding that it’s not how many people you send the release to, but the relevance of the release to those people. If you send it to 100 journalists but it’s only relevant to two of them then you’ll only potentially get two pieces of coverage. Simple as that.

If PRs took the time to get to know Charles (or any other journalist) and build a relationship with them then they will find out what kind of news he’s interested in.

Blimey, am I? I thought I consistently got “rudest sod” or something.

A couple of clarifications, though.
1) I’m not saying I never want to hear from PR companies by email. Some do understand what I do, and pitch ideas that are relevant. The ones I’ve called out have been essentially spamming me – sending me details about the appointment of the something-or-other manager in Arabia, or the new line of $60,000 servers with new Flashing Lights(TM). That’s unacceptable: it shouldn’t be acceptable business practice. I used GMail too, but it’s impossible to keep on top of the email I should be reading when I have to plough through dozens of subject lines on other irrelevant topics.
2) if I get loads of people @ing me on Twitter with irrelevant stuff, I will block them. Noise stops at once.
3) what needs to change is the idea that you can spam email at the few remaining full-time tech journalists. There are so few of us around, and we have access to so many other sources of news, that thinking that putting us onto a mailmerge with 500 other people is going to get any result is frankly bonkers. It has the opposite.
4) what’s needed more than anything is the personal touch. I do explain what I want (on my personal blog) and the section itself shows what we write about. Anyone who can’t fathom our agenda from that really needs to consider whether some other profession beckons. Plumbing pays better than PR, at least on the lower levels. And it’s always going to be in demand.

I did indeed recently announce that I would only accept PR pitches via Twitter: http://www.businesszone.co.uk/item/195015/1107/1097/1096 for a couple of days and it proved to be an interesting experiment. I certainly saw a massive reduction in emails and phone calls and some of the tweeted pitches (or twitches) were very inventive. However, I still received a couple of ‘are you interested in a good story?’ tweets and lots of completely irrelevant material.

PRs need to acknowledge that the way news is gathered has changed. Social networks like Twitter have given ‘normal’ people the power to breaks news and an increasing number of journalists are turning to such platforms to source content. That is not to say that there is no longer a role for PR professionals but they need to think differently about how they communicate with journalists.

Brands – and the PRs representing them – also need to adjust. You only need to look at the negative tweets on Twitter over the weekend about AT&T’s poor wireless network at the South by South West festival which forced the company to respond to see how things have changed.

But, I think there will be two problems here. First, if Charles gets 30 pitches a day, he’ll end up with the same problem on Twitter as he has on email – a system clogged up with stuff he doesn’t want to read. Secondly, I don’t agree that exclusives don’t mean much these days. My experience is that the best results come from tailored pitches to individual journalists, not mass mailings – and an open Tweet is effectively a mass mailing. But I guess that’s a personal choice for each journalist.

It’d be really interesting for you to talk to Charles again in 3 months and see how this has worked?

I see Twitter as yet another channel for real relationship-building and I can’t imagine why a PR person wouldn’t use it. That said, if they are only on Twitter to ’sell’ then they won’t get very far.

The one thing I’ve been wondering though is this: should reporters set up standalone accounts for pitches? If they do, will they monitor them as much as their normal account or will it be ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

Last year I took a slightly different tack however to Charles, one that allows PR people to send whatever they like at any time, and for me to glance at and ignore or read the stuff easily: Gmail. I’m moving all my communications with PR companies into Gmail, which they can sediment over as much as they like.

Some more unkind journos will consider a service like Mailinator.com for this purpose, but I’m one of the nice ones.