Media in the New Millennium

posted by Doyle

I did a post a while back made of of Twitter posts (Tweets, for you Twitter users!) from Adweek’s Brian Morrissey. For the most part, he’s spot on when he talks about the PR profession. But not long ago he posted this on Twitter:

Why don’t PR firms establish a site where reporters/bloggers can state contact pref (ie, no phone calls) and firms agree to honor?

Honestly, the good PR people figure this out without such a site. Reporter preferences are available in many databases, but the best way to figure things out is to ask. That’s just how business works — no one wants to irritate the people they’re trying to do business with.

But Brian, I have to disagree on this one because you made it a one-way street. It’s not one-way and it simply can’t be. Like you, PR people have a job to do. There are good reporters, and there are bad reporters, just as there are good PR professionals, and there bad ones — those that make the job harder for all of us. In the end, I’m sure there are PR professionals you not only don’t mind hearing from, but that you look forward to hearing from, as they bring you good story ideas and treat you with professional respect.

That’s where the two-way street comes in: we need some professional respect in return. If all of us make it a two-way street, it can make all of our jobs more efficient and make our relationships more beneficial all the way around.

For example, let’s say that you only want to be contacted via email, and I honor that. I send you a pitch, and I never hear back. Should I just assume you got it but you’re not interested? Isn’t it possible it didn’t go through, that it got caught in a spam filter or got buried in a too-full inbox? That happens to all of us. Just how far do you think I’d get with my clients if my standard answer was “Gee, I sent an email, but I never heard back. I guess he wasn’t interested.” I guess? I’ve had many reporter say to me, “Thanks for following up… I didn’t get your email.”

Let me turn that same scenario back to you: does your editor let you off the hook when you need information, confirmation or a quote, and you tell him/her “Gee, I sent an email, but the guy never got back to me. Guess we can’t run the story.”

Somehow, I doubt that’s the response that landed you writing for Adweek.

In the end, we face many of the same challenges, you and me. If I can tell a client “Got an email from Brian Morrissey, and he’s not interested” it allows me to move on, give an answer and maybe do my job better. If three reporters who all seem to be good targets tell me “no thanks,” I can counsel my client that the story isn’t working, or the pitch is off, or it’s old news, etc. Without some feedback, it’s hard to know what the problem is — from an overworked reporter to an off-target pitch, bad story or an overactive spam filter.

If reporters didn’t ever use anything from PR people, the industry wouldn’t exist. Reporters wouldn’t participate in services like Peter Shankman’s “Help A Reporter Out.” I wouldn’t have reporters who welcome my calls, because I bring them good ideas. No reporters would ever call me looking for story ideas (and they do). In the end, I’d have to do something different for a living.

To answer your original question, good PR professionals DO try to keep track of how reporters like to be contacted. Sometimes we miss, and sometimes we guess wrong when we start a relationship with a new reporter. But we try, and we welcome input. But we need feedback to get better.

So here’s my serious offer: I’ll start a Wiki at Metzger Associates on which any reporter can post their contact preferences. But in addition to those preferences, anyone who posts must also agree to adhere to a few requests. Specifically:

• If we pitch you in your preferred way, you have to acknowledge the pitch with at least a “no thank you” so we can move forward and know our pitch wasn’t lost.
• If you don’t say “no thanks,” we can follow up outside of your preferred method of contact.
• If we ask you to schedule time, you’ll spend a couple of minutes on the phone or in an email helping us understand how to refine our pitches to better meet your needs.

I’ll build the Wiki if you’ll help us out. Let me know! Thanks, Brian!

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