The Intersection of Online and Offline

Like a rabid dog with a with the mailman’s leg, I just can’t seem to let go of the whole hand-wringing scenario about media and public relations “professionals” doing bad pitches. In the old days, I have noted, as a young buck in the PR agency side of things, I reporters would screen my calls or just hang up on me. And it was over. I’ve been rejected more times than Kate Moss at Weight Watchers meetings (and I won’t even get into my dating life back in the day).

Now you have things like the “Bad Pitch Blog,” designed to bitch-slap mostly junior or clueless individuals who don’t know how to pitch properly. The tag line is “read our wrath.” That’s telling. I won’t mention any of the creators by name, but you need to get over yourselves. Has anyone keyed your car? Stolen your iPod? Assassinated your penguin? You don’t kill a fly with a sledgehammer, and this site reeks of new media hubris. Bad karma. I loved Jason Falls’ “Friday Frustrations” post in which he stated:

“A-list bloggers have an awfully bad habit of blowing smoke up each other’s asses. I’m probably guilty of it, too, though I don’t consider myself an A-lister, but for chrissakes people, you’re not celebrities so stop acting like them.”

Amen, brother.

I swear this is the last time that I am going to say this, but somehow, I am not that irritated by bad pitches. I either ignore them or have even created a folder in my email programs that pick up on key words, stores them there and I go back and read them when I have time. Maybe I am a softy in this regard because I have been both the pitcher and the pitchee, but I think that most people complaining about this just need to get over themselves (see above).

But in the spirit of “can’t we just get along?” here are just a few fundamental tips that I would provide to people who pitch either in the offline or online environment. Good communication is good communication if it’s a ten page fax or a 140 characters.

1. Identify your target audience. If you are looking to reach a target audience via a publication or blog, your first step should be making sure that the outlet matches up with the audience that you are attempting to influence. Otherwise, as Shel Holtz calls it, it is just “shovelware.”
2. Think about your objectives. Why are you communicating with this audience? I know that in the agency world you are communicating because your client thinks that he/she should be above the fold in the Wall Street Journal, but if you spend some time thinking about the benefits NOT to your client or organization but to the people receiving or potentially reading the information, you’ll go a long way towards happy, shiny people reading what you have to say. And if you work for an agency, the best consultants know when to say “no, this will be a waste of your money.” Courageous conversation for sure, but things will end up better.
3. What messages are your target readers likely to want? Knowing this will make you happy and, provided that you select the right people to pitch, it will make the writers/bloggers happy too.
4. List the types of questions that individuals may ask or additional information they may want. This is how your are going to write your pitch, your press release, or if you are doing it right, putting together your interactive press release. Answer these questions in advance and reflect it in the way that you present your information.
5. What do you want to achieve? Think about this in two ways. If you send a pitch to a blogger or print reporter, what is the action that you want he/she to take? Visit a link with more info (good call). Read an attachment (bad call: Esther Schindler has correctly noted that “attachments merit the death penalty”). If you have spent all of the time and money getting something placed, I am no fan of the statement “raising awareness.” In the age of interactivity, there has to be some action that people reading your information can take besides merely processing it.
6. Surmising that you accomplish your objectives, then what? If a reporter calls you back, you had better have your act together (no “ummm, uhhh,” or putting reporters on hold while you look for your cheat sheet with talking points on it) . And for God’s sake, list your cell phone number on your voicemail. If a reporter/blogger calls you back and gets your voicemail, it drastically reduces your chances.
7. Push vs. pull. Regurgitating information all over people who may or may not want it can work, but a largely ignored pitching vehicle is simply putting information where you want reporters or bloggers to get it. Think: ProfNet, SEO, Peter Shankman’s “Help a Reporter” listserv and Web site. If your information is waiting for people who want it, your chances go up dramatically.

I could go on and on, but given the fact that I keep promising that this will be my last post on bad pitches, look for my next post on bad pitches.

Mark

The title of this post has everything to do with just about every major political race in the country, but I am unfortunately not at NetRoots right now. Jealous, well, yes. Not at Podcamp Boston either. In fact, I am writing this post in my back yard. (Quick note: when I went to find the link to Podcamp Boston, I noted that it says in big letters on the index page: PODCAMP BOSTON IS AT CAPACITY: NO WALKINS PLEASE!). Keep this in mind as you read below.

I don’t get to talk politics much thanks to the Hatch Act (which, as I noted in my final post in my old blog before I erased it) is that the only thing worse than this piece of legislation is Orrin Hatch’s music. And THAT’s bad. But back to my point.

Folks like Patrick Ruffini made this point a long time ago, and David Wescott brought it up again in the context of mommy bloggers as a built-in audience with whom to dialogue. This is the year that we will see a huge impact in political campaigns due to social media. I am not talking fund raising, as much as securing the base; something that John McCain and Barack Obama clearly need to do to win.

Again, with credit to David Wescott who unearthed some research from George Washington University, every campaign manager’s dream is to have a highly networked, connected group of activists just waiting to be mobilized. He also noted in the survey, that politically active people:

“They also tend to visit blogs that share their viewpoint. Think of such blogs as their red meat. Indeed, 94% read only blogs on one side of the ideological spectrum, with 90% of liberals and 90% of conservatives sticking to like-minded blogs. Self-proclaimed “moderates” don’t blog shop either, with 89% exclusively reading either liberal or conservative blogs.”

So think of this: if I am on the political Left and get Daily Kos on my side, it’s a win. On the right, ditto for Little Green Footballs. Everyone waited breathlessly for social media to have an impact in 2004, and it was more of a whimper than a bang.

This is the year, folks. I don’t pay a lot of attention to fund raising on the Internet, because a) I don’t really believe the numbers anyway, and b) it will all equal out on the end on a national scale anyway. It’s about turning out your base, which is how the last two presidential elections were won.

Here we are in 2008, and blogs are hooked to each other which are hooked to Twitter which are hooked to Facebook which are aggregated by FriendFeed. People who read or write political blogs tend to be more politically active and influential - and connected. This is a powerful, new phenomenon that has occurred since the last presidential election cycle. I was a marketing major, and we used to say that you have to touch people five different ways using a marketing mix before you get their attention. See above.

The Perfect Storm is in place, and this is the year.

Curious to hear from folks at Podcamp Boston ot NetRoots on this one.

Mark

Thanks to Esther Schindler (via Twitter), I read a fascinating article in CIO.com that presented a rare look into the business of spam. The article details the case against Adam Sweaney, a man who it is alleged made more than $1 million spamming. Among the picture it paints includes the fact that:

“Sweaney said he earned about US$2,500 a month for a couple of years selling botnets that could be used for a variety of activities including sending spam e-mails. He didn’t even write them himself, but he traded or bought them in online forums, he said.”

The article is a worthy and fascinating read, but I am a guy — and am physiologically incapable of reading about a problem without offering a solution. It’s been bumping around in my head for some time, and this article triggered my brain to write it. Thanks, Esther.

The e-marketer newsletter, quoting SpamHaus, makes the point for me:

“Spam will continue to be a problem for as long as some businesses see some value in it. According to recent news reports, a well-organized spammer can send between 60 and 70 million e-mails a day (two billion a month). On average, there is a positive response to 0.05% of those e-mails, potentially delivering 36,000 e-mail leads per day to the companies that use spam.”

The is no precise figure that I can come up with, but an incredibly dated report from the University of Maryland put the annual cost to businesses at about $22 billion. That’s serious.

The CAN SPAM Act was a joke because, as the CIO article notes, most of the “serious” spammers are impossible to detect and many operate offshore. So the time that we spent writing and passing the bill in Congress a) did nothing to reduce the quantity of spam emails that I receive (about 1,500 per week) and b) we have really only caught one “big fish,” Robert Alan Soloway.

To me, the only way to make spam go away is to spend money on educating the public not to click on messages that they don’t recognize. It’s pretty simple: remove the incentive for the spammers and their customers, the business dries up and these scumbags go away.

I’m pretty convinced that government is incapable of handling the problem and spammers are clever enough to stay one step ahead of the spam filters, but if spam is costing businesses and ISPs BILLIONS of dollars, why not come up with a three-year, public awareness campaign to educate computer users about what spam is, how it is more than just an annoyance and much, like your annoying sibling, if you ignore it, it will just go away. If you throw in some scare tactics like viruses and malware, people will listen up.

The irony is that email as a tool to reach and educate computer users is out of the question, but think how many people responded to the “Do Not Call” list when it came out. People were ticked off and found a way out (I know, I know, it was government), but I think that a good mix of earned and paid media (print, TV, op-eds, summits, blogs, coalitions, over a sustained period of time, could remove the demand, evaporate the customers and dry up the money.

C’mon ISPs. C’mon large, private employers who are spending money fighting this. Put just a couple of billion into a campaign to make consumers smart and save a lot over the long run.

Mark

P.S. - You’ll note that on the “contact” page of this blog, I have a s-p-e-l-l-e-d out version of a Gmail address. My primary ISP is Verizon, but I filter all of my email addressed through Gmail. Verizon caved like cowering sheep to a class action lawsuit because they were filtering “legitimate” email, probably from Nigerian royalty.

Had a lot of fun writing an article for Media Bullseye last night, which was published today. I think that I had even more fun with the title: “Tubes, Rubes and Boobs.”

• The tubes - what Senator Ted Stevens thinks the Internet is made up of;
• The rubes - just about every legislator on Capitol Hill who professes Internet skillz; and
• The boobs - what Representative Michael Capuano is attempting to protect us from, using franking rules.

When I took some time to research just how stupid the entire debate was over Representative John Culberson’s tweets, I had to take my shots (in writing and in liquid form).

Happy reading.

Mark