Maybe It Was All A Big Misunderstanding?
A friend in the Twittersphere – with weekend access to the ubiquitous Cision/MediaMap database of media contacts – confirms that Gina Trapani’s personal email address is provided for PR’s use.
That doesn’t mean that PR is off the hook. Mistakes and misunderstandings will continue to occur in the PR/Media relationship, and PR pros still have much work to do. But I can’t help it, I feel a li’l better knowing we might be able to pass the buck on this one.
P.S. to the haters: yea, we sometimes rely on databases to store and track and retrieve contact info. Barbaric, medieval, outrageous, I know.
UPDATE – the proof (click to view larger size on Flickr):
Picture deleted at Ms. Trapani’s request. Wish it was as simple to ask her to delete that %$#*&%ing wiki.
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Thanks for doing the work to investigate this issue from all angles. I’m still very new to PR, but I have already learned that one of the trickiest parts of the job can be figuring out how to adhere to a complicated sort of etiquette where there are simply no hard and fast rules.
Whether some people like to admit this or not, the simple truth is that PR people are a vital part of the information exchange. Good PR should help hone the company/product’s messaging to the essentials and help reporters/bloggers gather facts and background information necessary to fleshing out a good story.
Pitching is only a part of what we do and we try to pitch strategically — but, yes, we’re still quite human and busy. However, those who decide to catch my pitch will find a tireless and enthusiastic assistant in gathering and sorting through the minutia for the most relevant and compelling information.
Who knows, I would probably even be happy to work out the interview scheduling according to their availability.
Yikes – that explains a lot. Poor Gina, I can only imagine how harangued she must have been. Bad Cision! Thanks, Todd, for sharing this.
One piece of advice. Read the contact overview. Often, they will tell you how they want to be pitched and who they want pitching to them. It saves everyone’s time. It helps to avoid ruining relationships. They took the time to type it, you take the 3 seconds to read it and you’ll have a much better day, I promise you on this one.
I don’t think it is completely Cision fault here, public relations practitioners know better then the spam bloggers. They are just providing that contact just as they provide any other contact for various media outlets. Of course providing her personal email is not acceptable and should be replaced with a work or blogger email.
It just goes to show you that we as public relations practitioners still have much to learn about how to effectively reach bloggers.
@Katie, I said “PR is not off the hook”… But since Gina’s primary complaint was re: use of her personal email address, my point is that A LOT of her angst could have been avoided if Cision had accurate info on her contact preferences.
Hey Todd, Although I can understand this happening, I don’t really think that Cision holds all the blame. I also don’t think you’re heaping all of it on them, either.
Now, it would be good for Cision to get into this discussion, but realize why they likely aren’t.
) I’m guessing it is either (a) they don’t want to deal with the backlash and/or (b) they actually aren’t listening.
It is an ongoing debate about how well any media list provider (forget Cision, think of all of them) truly vets their offerings. So, if we’re always doubting the lists, why trust them? Use them as a starting point, not an end point. Vet them. Each entry.
Who really *trusts* any media list, especially if it isn’t your own? Hey, I don’t even trust mine because I know that if I wrote to journalist ‘A’ three months ago, s/he could be elsewhere now. It is the nature of the market.
I’m a firm believer that each contact needs to be vetted before the send button is clicked. Some may say naive, while I will say smart.
Let’s face it, we all have a little blame to shoulder in all of this. How many times have I covered pitching and contacting journalists/bloggers/et.al.? Many times, I assure you. But, is it still enough? I doubt it. Note to self for summer semester and beyond.
For those unfortunately on the list, I can understand and empathize with the feelings each must have. Best practice from here is to re-address in-house, make that mea culpa sincere to the offended party, try to rebuild a bridge and then … move on.
Really would like to hear from Cision, I must admit.
@Robert -
You know I don’t disagree with you, but I also must point out that (expensive!) dbase vendors like Cision tout their ability to keep the PR industry up-to-date: dbases like this allow PR firms to scale-up their outreach (since double-checking for a simple email address every-single-time would get wearisome and is counter-productive).
FWIW I got an email from Cision today. They’ve updated Gina’s contact prefs.
Cision is an excellent PR tool in a media landscape that notoriously makes finding contact information for publications impossible to find, hidden in poorly designed websites or absentmindedly forgotten.
As you said Todd, publications and journalists want the first scoop on breaking news. Without contact information, that is impossible. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the generic editor@publication.com emails were well-responded to (or ever), but the fact is, publications often don’t do a good job of handling that internally. So us PR professionals are left to sift through other means to find relevant contacts.
Now, maybe Lifehacker does a great job of looking through those emails, but unfortunately I think they suffer from an industry that on the whole, doesn’t, and one that in doing so that has created a market for lists like Cision.
Another helpful feature of Cision is that they list titles and areas of interest, which helps us to target pitches to people who care. We try as hard as we can to target only the people who the pitch relates to, but unfortunately in the age of new media it’s difficult to separate a blogger from the press.
Take Gina for example, she is a blogger, yet she works for Gawker Media which has more influence than most print publications in that space. And so it is that she finds herself on Cision. The problem was that her email address slipped through the cracks in the system.
I hope that all the email addresses on Cision were opt-in. I wouldn’t want to pitch to someone on their personal email that didn’t ask for it, and I would hope that the places where we look for contact info would adhere to that. We pay for things like Cision to get our clients’ news out to people who are interested, and hopefully in a non-invasive way. Invading someone’s personal email where it’s not expected is not what we want.
I hope that Gina and the other people that are posting PR blacklists will understand these points and realize that the problem comes from both sides.
Its interesting, blog overviews on Cision are now prefaced with:
The fundamentals of working with bloggers are the same as with traditional journalists at traditional media outlets: respect their schedules; take time to read their material to learn their interests; and only contact them if/when they want to be contacted. You will also find that if a blogger is a journalist for another outlet(s), Cision tracks their contact preferences there as well. The outlets offers RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
Has this always been there or is Cision taking proactive steps?
Blogger relations tip: Check the blog before you press send
In all the chatter this week about blacklists and the quality (or lackthereof) of media databases, a comment by Doug Haslam, both on Twitter and a post by John Cass and Jason Falls, reminded me of one of my personal