A bad, bad pitch
See Update at the end of this post.
As a PR person, I have to admit things are getting pretty weird when I find myself rolling my eyes at the volume of press releases and pitches that find their way to my in-box. Most get a quick glance, just in case they might be interesting, followed by an even quicker deletion. Every so often, one will catch my eye. Unfortunately, that’s mostly not because it’s something in which I’m interested. More likely it’s because of how truly awful the pitch is.
But even then I don’t write about them. But today’s example just rubbed me the wrong way. It was distributed by a full-service public affairs company called Adfero Group out of Washington, D.C. The pitch got off on the wrong foot by spelling my name wrong:
Shel -
I wanted to let you know about an innovative new PR tactic that the readers of the “Shel Holz” blog might find interesting.
If someone from Adfero had actually read my blog, they’d know there’s a “t” in Holtz. Like Lou Holtz. (No relation.) But I had to admit to being intrigued despite the bad introduction. An innovative new PR tactic readers of my blog might find interesting? Tell me more! Here’s the rest of the pitch, with spelling, capitalization, punctuation and emphasis duplicated as is:
Today, the Adfero Group (a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs firm) announced the formation of a Homeland Security Practice led by Vice President Chris battle with an interactive news release. (Found here: http://www.adferogroup.com/media/?p=1). While the announcement itself is newsworthy, what is even more interesting for you is the blog-friendly interactive content included in the release.
In addition to video clips and links to share the release through Delicious and Digg, the release also includes a “Technorati Favorites” link . Postings from the blogosphere that link to the site will appear on the release itself - allowing bloggers to directly shape the news story as it develops.
This new type of interactive content will revolutionize the way news releases are conceptualized and distributed - they will no longer be static, paper-based document but rather tools of Web 2.0 that are conversational.
We invite you to give your feedback on Adfero’s new practice and this innovative approach to news releases by writing about it on your blog.
Best regards,
Account person’s name here
Funny. That sounds just like the social media press release format I’ve been touting for, what, a year? The same concept that has a home on the web and a working group. The same kind of release that got a lot of well-deserved attention when introduced by SHIFT Communications well over a year ago in response to an appeal by journalist Tom Foremski. The same kind of release that is available to anyone through a commercial product and to clients of Edelman, which announced its social media release service back in December 2006. The same kind of release I’ve been preparing for clients for some time. The same kind about which I produce a podcast.
Nah. Gotta be my mistake, because the pitch suggests this is Adfero’s creation.
Well, maybe so, because the Adfero release doesn’t include most of the elements that make a social media release useful. For example, the text is all still narrative. No breaking out of news into a bullet list under the heading of “News Facts.” No splitting out of quotes. No Technorati tags. No purpose-built del.icio.us page. The list goes on. I would hope that firms like Adfero might explore what’s already out there before embarking on an adventure like this one.
Unfortunatley, it seems nobody at Adfero Group was even a little aware of the social media release (which means no research was undertaken at all). Even more amazing, the agency’s rep pitched me without reviewing my blog enough to learn that I’ve been writing pretty extensively about the social media release (and as recently as last week).
And they spelled my name wrong. Did I mention that?
(I bet I don’t get pitched by Adfero Group any more.)
Incidentally, here’s another take on bad blogger pitches.
Update: Kevin Dugan, one of the bloggers behind the Bad Pitch Blog, emailed to tell me he found exactly the same pitch email—word for word—in his spam filter. Pitching bloggers needs to be an individual activity, not the distribution of a form letter. Also, Jeff Mascott from Adfero has joined the conversation in the comments section of this post, in a level and intelligent way. Good to see.
Too funny...like trying to show Houdini a new card trick. What’s scary is that some people may actually fall for this.
Posted by Shannon Whitley on 08/02 at 06:16 PMOuch! I was wincing as I read this.
Outing stuff like this plays a valuable role in educating (and scaring off) people who might get pushed to do the same stupid work.
Posted by Paull Young on 08/02 at 06:58 PMHeh… have you clicked on that T’rati link (http://tinyurl.com/2g3u5e) yet? Right now, the only blog post it lists is, ah, this one.
On the upside, if they didn’t read your blog before sending you that pitch, they sure as hell will now. (At least this once.)
Posted by Rob Cottingham on 08/03 at 04:36 AMShel -
Thanks for your posting.
We are familiar with and very much appreciate Shift’s efforts to develop the “social media press release” template. It is a great step in the right direction for the Public Relations industry.
Our model differs slightly from Shift’s in one key regard.
When a release is posted on a web site it really ceases to be a press release. When a release is online the audience is not only the traditional media but also bloggers and, most importantly, the general public. Therefore, we would make the case that listing news facts and quotes in a bullet point form is not the most effective method of communicating news.
The best approach for a news release is still the narrative format – it the easiest to read by reporters, bloggers and interested citizens alike. The approach we have taken is modeled more after the online versions of some more forward thinking major dailies who have taken a traditional narrative article and published it online in a more conversational format. In particular, the Washington Post’s online version of articles allow for readers to become engaged with the material and make news more of a dialogue with its readers.
On this point we might have to agree to disagree.
Let’s keep the dialogue going. (And apologies for the misspelling. I know that can be frustrating.)
Best regards,
Jeff Mascott
Adfero GroupPosted by Jeff Mascott on 08/03 at 05:42 AMJeff, thanks for posting!
Several of us involved in the new media release initiative have advised that both a traditional and new media release are appropriate in most cases, to be distributed concurrently with cross-links to one another. That way, journalists get the benefit of the parsed content while those who find value in narrative can continue to use it.
I think it’s important to remember where this initiative came from—an appeal by a journalist. It was his (and other journalists’) complaints about the traditional press release that led to the idea of parsing news facts into bullets, which allows the journalist (rather than the PR agency) to “spin” the resulting article. It also makes it much harder to issue a release designed to get ink but that has no real news. Finally, when tagging standards are developed (part of the working group’s efforts), each bullet can be appropriately tagged for search enhancement.
The press release distribution companies (notably PR Newswire and Business Wire) are involved on the working group specifically to find a reasonable way to issue these releases for distribution, rather than simply house them on the web. (PR Newswire’s MultiVue accommodates that now, but is prohibitively expensive for a lot of companies.)
Posted by Shel Holtz on 08/03 at 06:37 AMShel -
Points well taken. You know as well as we do that in the not too distant future all organizations will need to create and publish news in a conversational format and join the ongoing dialogue or they risk become irrelevant.
Again, let’s keep the conversation going. More to come on this topic from our shop…
Thanks, Shel.
Jeff
Jeff Mascott
Adfero GroupPosted by Jeff Mascott on 08/03 at 07:00 AMI agree with 95% of what you say, and think Adfero have misfired on most of this.
However, I have to agree with Jeff about the narrative as opposed to bullet points. The bullet point approach just doesn’t work for me, or for nearly all the journalists I’ve spoken. Almost all prefer proper narrative news releases, with the ‘bonus’ feature of social media news releases - multimedia, comments, links, choice of quotes etc.
And crucially I very strongly believe that bullets are NOT “one of the elements that make a social media release useful”.
Bullets just make the release far harder to read and use. If bullets were really easier to read, then you’d be writing all your blog posts in bullets - and I’d stop reading
Posted by Stuart Bruce on 08/03 at 10:29 AMHi, Stuart; good to hear from you!
Your point is the reason I advocate two versions of the release—one traditional and one social media. But I go back to Tom Foremski’s original argument:
“Deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.”
That post is here, by the way: http://tinyurl.com/evakp
Perhaps Todd Defren and Phil Gomes could weigh in.
Posted by Shel Holtz on 08/03 at 11:03 AMThat’s why when I first tried social media news releases I did both. However, when I started talking to people I decided in most cases it wasn’t worth the extra effort to create both - the narrative was far more popular. For a client with a big budget I’d still do both, but for most I’d only do the narrative as it’s simply not cost-effective to do something that only appeals to a small number of people.
Incidentally, the trackback to my post on Tom’s original post still generates a lot of traffic to my blog - an indication of the interest in this subject.
Posted by Stuart Bruce on 08/03 at 09:58 PMShel,
As an employee at Adfero, I’d like to offer a couple of views to what has become an intriguing conversation here on your blog.
First, getting your name wrong is inexcusable. There’s nothing else that can be said about that.
Regarding the bulleted quotes versus narrative style, I admit that I was the one who pushed hardest for that concept in our company. As a former journalist, I don’t find the list of quotes, largely without context, to be compelling. Most reporters, particularly at large newspapers, aren’t going to take a canned quote of any kind – in a narrative or listed in bullet point. At some overworked newspapers, however, the reporters may be more willing to use the quote than try to reach the source on the phone just to get an exclusive comment. In this case, the narrative format is even more critical so that the reporter can use the comment appropriately.
While I respect your idea of sending two news releases – one with the narrative and one without – our goal was to create a release that accomplishes our goals in one document. Our goals might be slightly different than yours and Shift’s (and we are very familiar with Shift’s work and applaud them for breaking new ground).
For one thing, we are not writing solely for journalists. One of the things that makes the new media environment so much more productive is that organizations can issue their news releases directly to the public. The goal is go convince the mainstream media and the blogosphere to pick up the release and run a story about it, but it is not the only goal. Equally important is to deliver that information directly into the hands of target audiences in the public. And for this, they very much need the context and background that the narrative format provides.
We believe that what makes the evolving design of the news release exciting isn’t so much how the information is laid out on the page. It is how it invited ongoing dialogue with the target audience through the capability for comments, links to Delicious, Digg, Newsvine, etc., and its multimedia ability to provide potentially extensive background information via additional resources (white papers, links to other related articles or commentary), video interviews or exhibits, and other graphical support.
We very much appreciate what Shift has done, as well as yourself, and by no means claim to have originated the concept of the dynamic news release or social news release. We do, though, think we have some small part to offer in this ongoing debate and enjoy the opportunity to participate.
Regards,
Chris Battle
Adfero GroupPosted by Chris Battle on 08/07 at 06:55 AMHi Shel,
I have to say that I’m intrigued by this story as well. I actually tried reaching out to Jeff Mascott (above) after reading this article in Adweek: http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003608601
In it he was quoted as saying that Adfero Group was working on a new style and nomenclature for the Social Media Release. I actually tried initiating a conversation about the idea of a “Social Bulletin” instead of a SMR. Not only as it impossible to find any contact information other than a generic message field from their website, after receiving no response I gave up (and eventually ran with my recent post on Social Bulletin vs. SMR on my own blog). Either way, certainly not the social interaction or dialogue I would expect from a company trying to position itself as a pioneer in this space.
I suppose it’s not really surprising now that we see this release, however. Looks more like the Gold Rush that Brian Solis is so vigilant of than a new innovation.
I also have to agree completely with your words on issuing two releases. The Core News Facts style of a Social Release is most effective when linked to narrative explanations of each in turn. Either way, it sounds like Adfero Group has a lot to learn about this space before they will be ready to lead any sort of innovation.
Best,
PaulPosted by Paul Dyer on 08/09 at 01:42 PMI’d certainly agree Adfero has a lot to learn, but we’re willing to acknowledge that. Our goal isn’t to be first in creating a new technique but to participate in the development of a useful vehicle for distributing information to the public—one that acknowledges the fantastic developments of the new media while also respecting the purpose of the news release and its intended audiences.
The concept of issuing two news releases for every announcement, for example, is at odds with the working habits of busy journalists in the traditional media. A balanced approach to shaping the evolution of the news release needs to consider all audiences. Bloggers are important to that equation, but traditional media and the clients who issue releases remain equally important. So is the need to communicate directly with the public. The bulleted quote format doesn’t quite negotiate that delicate balance, with its inherent tensions/conflicts between the competing interests of the different audiences.
Posted by Chris Battle on 08/10 at 05:44 AMMy apologies for taking so long to respond, Chris. I’ve been traveling with limited time, but I did think this was worth further discussion, which I have posted as a new item to the blog. I welcome your thoughts.
Posted by Shel on 08/12 at 05:45 PM
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