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 cardinal rules of blogger relations.
No matter how well you know the blogger or love the blog, it’s next to impossible to read every day, every post. No one expects that you will. But, if you are going to pitch, you absolutely must check the blog before you press <send>.
For the most part, we don’t have visibility into the lives of the mainstream media journalists to whom we email our pitches. We can’t be expected to know that they are on vacation or the dog died or they just got out of hospital. In other words, that it is a bad time to send a pitch.
Well, we do have that visibility into the lives of bloggers. Especially those that write about their lives, but even business/professional bloggers leave clues.
There is no excuse for not checking first, sending second.
Tags: blogger relations, pr, pr blacklist
No argument with you there Susan. Question is why so many bad pitches?
Why bad pitches? Too much focus on the product, not enough on the recipient is generally the reason, which plays out in a number of ways. This is one of them. A pitch that might interest you, or at least not irritate, arrives on a REALLY bad day. A blogger, might, just might take out his/her bad day on you.
This is excellent advice, Susan. I know there have been times when I’ve gone to pitch someone, seen by their blog that they are having a crisis or a bad time, and held off pitching them because it would be too invasive.