Don't make me say this again
Steve Hall at AdRants is, well, ranting. Seems he got a pitch from a major telecom company who had identified his site as one that covers sports.
I don't need to go into the dangers, illustrated in Steve's post on the matter, of blind pitching of blogs. You shouldn't do it, end of discussion. But the thing is this pitch probably could have been saved if the person sending the email had done just one additional thing.
They could have found a previous post Steve had put up that touched on sports or athletes being used in commercials and referenced that post in the pitch. That creates a sense on the part of the recipient that the PR person did at least a little bit of research in an effort to create a connection.
If Steve is anything like me, doing that would have garnered one of two results. Best case scenario, Steve decides that while it might be a tad off his normal beat, that it is interesting enough to post on and the pitch is successful. Worst case scenario, Steve decided that it's too far off his normal beat and just ignores it.
Instead we have what appears to be another example of someone who got ahold of a list that had some, well, let's just call them “categorization issues†when it came to identifying blog topics. And, as has happened so often, the company behind the pitch has been brought out to the town square for every one to see.
When I talk to people about pitching bloggers I try to emphasize that the processes hasn't actually changed from those in place before with traditional media. But the stakes are much higher. All those steps you learned when studying media relations need to be followed to the letter. The problem was that pitching traditional media had devolved into a process with so many shortcuts that, I think, the industry was getting lazy.
One company, in the form of being called out by Steve Hall, has now gotten a wake-up call that hopefully will result in better practices being followed in the future.
