Cheekiness aside, being called out on a bad pitch and fixing your problem is better than continuing to give bad pitches and wondering why you can’t get anyone interested in your ideas.

You make an interesting point about the youth issue. Maybe to the younger crowd, a vague pitch would be enough (i.e., among true “friends”)?!

Flare ups like these will lead to that much needed experience, eh? How else do we GET experience, except thru the occasional failure?

The question arises, is Margaret continuing to make similar posts, which just are not posted by bloggers?

May I also ask, what steps should a company or PR agency take when managing newbies to the world of online public relations?

I also find it amazingly ironic that a lot of people point to the use of social media by youngsters as evidence of the huge changes in today’s media landscape and also make pompous statements about how older people are not as new media savvy as younger people because they aren’t young and have not grown up using online social networks. Yet when push, comes to shove, if a youngster makes a gaffe in social media we give them the benefit of the doubt. Quite frankly I think it’s rather odd. Margaret’s example does not really justify for me, but the example of the Intern sending an anonymous post to Jeff Jarvis after he ribbed Dell over its first version of the Dell blog does. There’s a lot to be said for the wisdom that comes with experience.

I can see the new tagline now: “Read PR-Squared if you want to know what NOT to do.”

I’m a little late on this but this discussion has been extremely valuable to me as a PR newbie myself! Todd, your blog is great.. My boss recommended it to me since I just started and its already giving me a great idea of what not to do when I write my first pitches! My heart goes out to Margaret too… although as someone mentioned I hope she does get some sort of fame from this. Thanks again and hopefully you won’t be seeing me on bad pitch blogs in the future!

Congratulations to Todd Defren at Shift Communications for screwing up on a social media outreach programme. Actually it’s not so much congratulations for screwing up, but more for doing the right thing by acknowledging it, sharing the experience and l…

Congratulations to Todd Defren at Shift Communications for screwing up on a social media outreach programme. Actually it’s not so much congratulations for screwing up, but more for doing the right thing by acknowledging it, sharing the experience and l…

I actually don’t think you have much to apologize for here. Not every “pitch” is going to a gold nugget.

We’re still feeling our way through digital media relations and I discuss some initial thoughts on PR/media relations on our blog here:

http://racetalk.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/press-20/

I think journalists and bloggers need to take some responsibility and start to use some proper decorum. Is it right to publish an email pitch? Isn’t that a form of private communication? I’m not sure of what the right answer is — but it is a question worth considering.

So I’m still not sure what the purpose of Marshall’s post is. What value is he supplying to his readers? What’s the news here — that PR people sometimes send out bad pitches? I think we already all knew that.

Tell Margaret not to worry — the pain does go away after a few days. She should just be thankful that she’s not the Colorado Rockies…

I agree with some of the other posters here. This is relatively minor. It’s a mistake, it’s unfortunate and something you don’t like, but it was a generic pitch from someone relatively junior. It wasn’t deception, bribery, impersonation., etc.,

While there are issues with that, compared to the other gaffes, it isn’t in the same ballpark (kinda like the Rockies last night).