PR Pitches: Due for a Change-Up
I’ve written before about how PR pitches may change in the future. They may become more interactive and research-oriented. They may become more transparent. The way journalists receive PR pitches may change, too – from “push” (today’s email-based methods) to “pull” – or maybe even to “find.”
In a long-lost post, “Tag, You’re Pitched,” I broached the idea of posting pitches to blogs, then tagging these posts with the names of (relevant!) bloggers and journalists, who might subsequently find the pitch when they ego-surfed Technorati.
Well, that happened to me this week … and while I was intrigued (and, yea, I found the pitch, and here I am writing about it!) I also immediately recognized the potential for abuse. If this caught on, “tag spam” would quickly become the equivalent of “ticker spam.” In her blog post, Kari Hanson of ZoomInfo asks, “is it bad form to make the tags map to the target, not the content?” Turns out it is, Kari, in my opinion. Too bad, though; cool concept.
However, a hybrid approach has cropped up, that has been pinging on my radar lately. It’s called PitchWire, and the service describes itself thus:
“PitchWire is the first online community to bring influencers (Journalists, Bloggers and Analysts) and publicists together at the perfect time. The result is more successful ‘hits’ and a better relationship between influencers and publicists.”
A quick scan of the site suggests that PitchWire is powering influencers to create and edit the equivalent of their own MediaMap (err, re-named Cision, this month) entry. PitchWire is not quite cutting out the middleman, but it appears to be trying to more quickly and accurately communicate influencers’ preferences (broadly) and current projects (specifically) to the salivating hordes of PR pros.
I wasn’t willing to take this seriously until I saw that a respected journalist was giving it a go. Something to keep our eyes on. If anyone from PitchWire (corporate or user – PR or influencer) cares to weigh in on the pros & cons of this model, I’d be intrigued to hear some details.
Meanwhile, others are intrigued too, as you can see here and here.
Whatever happens to the PR pitch in the Social Media age, we can rest assured that it will change.
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Comments
I am willing to give this a try....
Posted by: Kipp Bodnar | April 19, 2007 09:56 AM
Thanks for inviting us to comment on the pros and cons of a service such as PitchWire.
Influencers as you know, want to reduce PR spam (defined as PR pitches not applicable to their area of coverage). Meanwhile, publicists are constantly fighting to rise above the noise just to get noticed.
The problem is that some publicists choose to use a shot-gun approach to pitching, rather than craft targeted pitches. As a result, everyone suffers – even the responsible publicists. One journalist told us that while he knows that there are probably good story ideas in the sea of pitches he gets, he just deletes them all as the bad outweighs the good and it is just too painful to separate the wheat from the chaff.
We address this issue by enabling journalists/influencers to control the way they are pitched. Each journalist has their own unique PitchWire page and pitch wizard, so PR spamming is impossible. And when they are short on resources, they can also use PitchWire to push out requests for stories, but instead of sending an unstructured email pitch, publicists are directed to their personalized pitch wizard that guides them on how they want to be pitched.
The downside is really for the PR spammers of the world as they will now have to send targeted, customized pitches to influencers. So if you are a responsible publicist that is already mindful of a journalist’s time, PitchWire will be a welcomed approach. If you have any other specific questions, we are happy to respond. We will also send your request for comments to our PitchWire users to let them weigh in on the issue.
Posted by: Michael Kovacs | April 20, 2007 04:50 PM
Hi Todd,
You're right about the need for a more thoughtful and interactive pitching process.
And I think Pitchwire shows terrific promise.
Beat-specific media relations services in travel and tourism like the one my company runs Media Kitty at http://www.mediakitty.com have been successfully managing a more personalized, two-way pitch process for years.
The same is true in the UK with services like Response Source and a newish service for journalists in real estate and property (name escapes me.)
The other beauty about services like these that I see is that they attract accountable PR people who are not afraid to "socialize" with journalists to get their jobs done to mutual benefit.
Love for our new community for Canadian journalists and PR people across many beats -- created in collaboration with the journalists and PR people in the network -- to be on your radar too. Newsbureau.ca at http://www.newsbureau.ca launched last week in beta we're off to a promising start!
Posted by: Heather Kirk | May 18, 2007 09:18 AM