Open Letter to Gina Trapani of Lifehacker
Hi Gina –
I’d email you directly but apparently you’ve blocked my agency’s domain name (along with many esteemed peers).
I have written many times about crummy PR practices, and have acknowledged more than one mistake of our own, over the years. I empathize with your frustration and regret that we added to it.
Sorry if we spammed you. We not only extensively train our folks, but we published a Blogger Relations Bookmark (PDF) that is laminated on each employee’s desk. However, mistakes will happen, if only because we insist on only hiring humans.
But “being human” is no excuse for stupid mistakes; I am not trying to be cheeky. We always strive to improve. If you can dig up the offending email from a shiftcomm.com address, I will publish and critique it on my blog, and will include any of your personal comments as well. We’ll gladly fall on the sword if it’s in service to improving our agency and our profession as a whole.
You’d expect me to say this but for every 999 compliments we get from media and bloggers, it’s a shame that it’s the one crap pitch that gets publicly outed. But that’s a risk built-in to my profession. I suppose that a risk built-in to your own profession is that you have to weed through 999 crap pitches to unearth that one stellar nugget. We each have a job to do, and our own crap to shovel through, eh?
In our case, it’s “spam if we do and damned if we don’t.” In your case, it’s spam if you don’t want it (even if we truly think it may be relevant), but damned if you want a competitor to scoop you on an agency’s one great pitch.
I hope you’ll re-think your blanket condemnation of the thousands of employees who work at those firms listed in your wiki. Thanks to outcries like yours, the PR profession is becoming ever-more cognizant of the need for change, and it truly is changing.
Of course, every industry will have its ignoramuses so feel free to blacklist individuals but, again, please consider giving the many thoughtful, helpful PR pros at those blacklisted firms a second chance.
Thanks.
P.S. – If this note does not sway you, I hope Brian’s note will.
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Todd, as someone who not only has pitched media and bloggers for longer than I can remember, but also receives dozens of pitches for my own blog each week, I certainly can empathize with both sides and I also agree with Gina that people should NEVER pitch her at her personal email. However, my issue remains with the way people are punishing people, it is an overreaction of media and bloggers by outing people on blogs.
It’s mean and it smacks of self-righteousness, it is done with little or no research into the companies nor an appreciation for all the times PR people have actually helped them out.
A large part of our time in PR is about teaching the right way and the wrong way, and this blog is one of the central educational sources. Difficult or not, it is certainly preferable to ‘blacklists’. There is an enormous difference between unlisted phone numbers and calling people out on public lists, and to compare this to restraining orders…well I’m really not sure where to go with that one.
Todd, just keep on doing what you are doing because you guys ARE doing it the right way; through education and transparency.
/kff
I agree with Todd on this one. And I just read the Topaz partners post on the subject too: http://topazpartners.blogspot.com/2008/05/block-tackle-pr-tackling-blocking.html
I like Doug’s explanation that this method is ‘blunt-object surgery’. Especially for bloggers. While big blogging outlets are going to be more like traditional media, with resources for finding information.
But, blogging already has a tendency to be a fishbowl with bloggers re-hashing popular stories over and over. At its best, PR offers a source of discovery that can be available to all bloggers. (And of course, at its worst makes bloggers feel overwhelmed and unable to focus on what they care about.)
The problem that I’m seeing from these recent ‘blacklistings’ is that PR is still focused on scoring the big hit. Now, that’s a bit shallow because I don’t work at a PR firm.
The test for PR is going to be if they can scale their work to the niches. Targeting the micro-influencers who will make an impact on the audience they want to reach but won’t look nearly as good in the clip book.
(Caveat: I’m not saying that SHIFT is doing it for the clip book. But, clients do like to see big names on the mastheads.)
Man, that comment is all over the place. I hope it makes sense.
@jljohansen
@Darren — it’s not ad hominem because you weren’t really trying to make an argument with your first comment. You were just taking a potshot (otherwise you wouldn’t have spent half your comment responding to the 999 out of a 1,000 line). Your second comment, on the other hand, is actually worth responding to.
I agree that a blacklist isn’t inherently wrong. The problem is that it’s a big weapon and it’s getting misused. The mentality seems to be “one strike and you’re out” and the penalty for being on the list is way too high. It’s going to affect people’s careers and I already know of one very good agency who lost a client over it. No doubt that there are some bad PR people on the list, but there are also agencies on there that are highly invested in doing things the right way. Given that this blacklist is an open wiki, it’s only going to get worse. I guarantee you that there will be bloggers who add PR people to the blacklist for pitches that any reasonable person would view as appropriate and respectful.
This is a tough one to call.
On the one hand, I agree with Todd (I wouldn’t go as far as calling what Gina did ‘extremism’). Just because a practitioner sends one or two press releases that the receiver feels are irrelevant doesn’t mean that the practitioner isn’t trying to cater their message to their intended audience.
But the fact of the matter is that Gina feels like PR practitioners are, in general, inconsiderately spamming her. It sounds like it’s up to us (I hope including myself in this group isn’t too arrogant of me) to convince her that a lot of us are really doing our best not to spam her with irrelevant releases.
While reading your post, I felt that perhaps your tone was a little too reactionary. I think that better empathizing with Gina’s frustration will yield greater returns in the long run.
That’s just my two cents.
Not buying it. Ball up, as a friend says. Someone at your agency decided that they didn’t want to go through LifeHacker, so they went to her personal blog and got that email address.
Once? Twice? Five hundred times? I don’t know, but it was still a personal email address. EOS.
@Jeremy -
“Ball up?” Is that what you’re saying to the guy who swallowed his pride to point out to the entire world (including clients & competitors) that his agency had fucked up somehow? And who further offered to extend that pain by publishing and commenting on the offending “spam?”
Do you also think, based on my writings here, that we run a shop that purposefully pissed off an influential blogger, not once but maybe even “500 times?”
Being able to man-up and admit mistakes is not something I’ve ever been shy about, amigo, and as a long-time reader you already knew that. Save the schoolyard taunts for the scores of OTHER agencies on that list who elected to let Gina’s wiki pass by unremarked-upon, eh?
@Bryan – I re-read this post 2X after reading your comment. I humbly disagree about a reactionary tone (but will also admit to being biased). We literally make employees go through hours and hours and hours of training, workshops, etc. so when we flub it, it drains me to the core.
Yep, Todd, ball-up. You might think you are swallowing your pride, but I read this post as a pass the hot potato.
If this was a swallowing pride, you could have left out that first line of being black-listed, sent the email to tips@lifehacker (or used a personal email address to send to her personal email address) and written a much smaller mea culpa that while we train, these things happen.
And, while I have read your blog, I also read your post where you threw the hot potato to a client regarding TechCrunch, instead of holding that potato and getting burnt.
@Jeremy -
Umm, I don’t get it. Who am I passing the hot potato to? Back to Gina? I don’t buy it. I am sorry if we spammed her and said so. I also disagree with the way she handled the situation, and politely asked her to reconsider. Are you suggesting that the other agencies on that list did the right thing by ignoring it?
(As for that long-ago TechCrunch episode: if a client blatantly disregards our counsel and proactively does something that can impact our agency’s reputation, you better believe I’ll call it out. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Not sure we can have transparency AND cling to the age-old “client is always right” mentality of yore. Surprised you disagree.)
Jeremy, it seems we rarely agree – even though I think we agree on many of the Big Points of Social Media. I’ve resigned myself to this sad reality and bow before your Snarky Genius. Have a great weekend, Mr. Pepper.
Black lists don’t work. For many reasons, not the least of which is the true spammers are playing a numbers game. A few blocks here and there? So what. No matter how popular the site, there’s always another one.
And black lists don’t solve the real problem, which is that companies, and their agencies, need to find better ways to engage with bloggers than they have been. It’s more than a pitch or a press release — we’ve got to do a better job of understanding why the blogger cares. I know SHIFT tries to do this. I also imagine like all agencies you face the usual pressures from clients to get coverage on things that aren’t terribly exciting.
More, much more on this, as you know, on my blog
Todd, just thought I’d throw my two-cents into the boxing ring where everyone seems to be throwing punches. Yeah, this is a problem that’s been around for a very long, long time and I don’t see it going away anytime soon for a multitude of reasons. But that’s not to say we (all sides) shouldn’t be communicating and working together to help ease the pain for us all.
Unfortunately, PR practitioners sometimes do cut corners by not regularly reading the blog that they are pitching or by failing to do a little research before pitching (hence then they would know that Gina doesn’t want pitches to her personal email but rather the lifehackers tips email address).
But another element that Gina fails to mention (and she may be unaware of) is that crappy Cision (and possibly Vocus, too. I’m not a subscriber there so I couldn’t check) has her personal email address listed as the email address to pitch to and doesn’t have the “tips” email listed at all.
I wanted to throw this point into the ring because it’s part of the problem and all day yesterday it was bothering me that nobody brought it to light, which is why I was thrilled to see that you (Todd) mentioned it on Meg Roberts’ post earlier today (which I gave you kudos for).
Cision is also part of the problem, but don’t get me started on Cision. Every time I have to use it I’m compelled to start a CisionSucks.com blog just to vent my frustrations, but I don’t, because that would only add to the problem and I’m not about that.