Gary Andrews

Ding! Another day, another poorly worded and conceived pitch arrives in my personal inbox, and my heart sinks a little further towards despair. If it weren’t for the Germans, and Portugal’s goal fest against the North Koreans, I’d have received more useless pitches than goals this World Cup.

Quite simply, judging by the majority of pitches than have landed in my inbox, general PR from companies looking to take advantage of the World Cup has ranged from poor to truly shocking. Most have made no attempt to remotely engage.

At least one email has been so laughably bad, I’ve sent it on to friends and colleagues so they can marvel that, yes, some agencies are still much worse than had previously been imagined.

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming, but at least one agency has come close to me breaking this general self-imposed rule. Not that they’d know – judging from their emails I’d be shocked if they’ve even ever bothered to read anything I write.

Here’s a few selected highlights:

• An email starting with the words: “Hi, we’ve created some virals for your blog.” No, no you haven’t.
• An fairly obvious copy and paste email email urging me to cheer on England three days after they were knocked out.
• A general assumption that I was a fanatical England fan. I support Wales. This is fairly obvious.
• An email asking me to send a copy of my publication to agency x if I ran a piece on the product they were hawking.
• The PR who sent a pitch during the opening game. We had better things to do at that stage.
• Several emails that had nothing to do with the World Cup, other than a hastily added sentence to include a reference. You’re fooling no-one here.
• All bar two emails started with ‘Hi’. Not ‘Hi Gary,’ or any attempt to make it personal. Just ‘Hi’.
• One insinuating I would be so desperate for content during a two day break of football that their pitch was the only way I could keep my readers hooked.
• Hardly any emails made any reference to the fact I write for half a dozen places at the best of times. It was always ‘for your blog’. Do they mean this place and its five readers?

There have been two exceptions to this general trend – two well-crafted, engaging pitches where the PR had clearly read the type of things I write about, read my profile and made a general effort.

They were the only two I replied to – and if they’re reading, you know who you are, and I’m sorry I’ve not been able to write about the information in your pitch. It was simply a case of lack of time. But I really did appreciate your emails and the personal touches. If I was using good examples of how to pitch to bloggers, these would be among them.

Speaking to other bloggers, the trend seemed to be depressingly similar. They too had received endless pitches from PRs labouring under the illusion that we were so excited about the World Cup, we’d write about any old tat that mentioned it.

They were half right. We’ve all been very excited about the World Cup.

I’d even go as far as to say that once the World Cup kicked off, unless the pitch was something very pertinent to the general narrative of the tournament, then football bloggers should have been the last people to pitch to.

The reason: we’ve all got more than enough to write about. With three games a day for the first two weeks, and then a couple more a day for a week after that, it’s really not as if any football blog is struggling for content during the World Cup. And as most bloggers generally have day jobs, unless it’s a pretty spectacular, the pitch is likely to be deleted, assuming it even gets read.

The really smart PRs – and there have been a few – would have got their campaigns and pitches in at least a couple of weeks in advance of the tournament. That stage is a bit of a deadzone, with a lack of any content or decent talking points.

And – on a small tangent – twofootedtackle’s Chris expressed amazement that I’d received so many general PR pitches. I’m such an infrequent writer, and aren’t fixed to any specific publication that I’m not an overly easy writer to target. Quite often the editors of the places I write for receive the same release, which is a bit of a waste of an email. There’s really not a great deal of point sending me a general release at the moment.

I’d like to stress that I’m definitely not PR-unfriendly – quite the contrary, if it’s a well-written, personalised and targeted pitch then I’ll make an effort to write about it, although this isn’t always possible. I’ve written some very interesting and enjoyable pieces off the back of good pitches.

But as somebody who has done plenty of blogger outreach, and still does the occasional bit in this area, I’m far less tolerant of badly done pitches, especially because I know that this stuff really isn’t rocket science and really isn’t hard to do well.

And at the end of the day, I can just hit the delete button. The guys at the brand who’ve paid for blogger outreach – and have no doubt been told that x number of blogs have been hit – are throwing thousands of pounds down the drain for incredibly bad PR and probably don’t even realise it.

UPDATE:

And the day this is published, the PR company I’ve already requested remove me from their mailing list, sends me another email inviting me to something I don’t want to go to. In Manchester. Next weekend. It’s fairly obvious, that I don’t live in Manchester. Or Birmingham, where the same thing I don’t want to go to is happening, but the weekend later. I have plans both those weekends. Exactly how many bloggers do they expect to get to this event? Or are they just box ticking?

My bad. I misread the email. They’re not inviting me to go to the events. Just write an enthusiastic blog post about them. Which is even less appealing.

Also, Chris O, as a final post on the excellent – and soon to be departed – Some People Are On The Pitch blog has done a list of every company that’s pitched them to write about brands that, if you ever read SPAOTP, you’d know they’d have little or no interest in writing about.

written by Gary \\ tags: football bloggers, pitching football bloggers, pitching to bloggers, PR, PR and bloggers, World Cup, World Cup PR

It’s a brave PR who’d pitch to the Devil’s Kitchen blog. It’s a particularly stupid one who, when emailing said blogger, gets basic information in that email concerning one of the most profanity-filled blogs on the internet so badly wrong:

Here’s a tip for you PR people out there (especially given that I am disinclined to punt your clients’ products simply because you ask**): if you want me to plug your product, may I suggest that you actually get the name of my blog correct?

Under the circumstances, the Devil was surprisingly restrained.

Seeing pitches like this posted on blogs like that annoys me. Not because it’s been posted, but because it makes the rest of us working in similar fields look bad, and suggests the majority of PRs don’t know their blogging arse from their internet elbow.

Cold-pitching to bloggers is a tad unnerving, as you never know how they’re going to react. A lot of PRs I know are still a tad reluctant to engage precisely for the reason, and when they get pulled up online about to, use that as an excuse to ignore social media communities altogether.

Their loss.

At the risk of sounding like a long-playing record, pitching to bloggers isn’t hard. It’s the same as pitching to journalists, just in a different medium and with a slightly different technique.

You wouldn’t email, say, Zoo magazine and address it to Loaded. Or to the Sunday Times Travel Section to suggest a piece for the Guardian. And neither would you send the same pitch for the same product to the Sunday Times as you would to Zoo.

The same goes for bloggers. Each blogger is different, has different likes and dislikes and there’s normally enough information on the blog to give you a good idea of what they’re likely to be interested in, and if they’re likely to take a pitch badly.

So in the case of The Devil’s Kitchen, even a cursory glance will tell you of an interest in politics, libertarianism, alcohol, and Apple products. And while he may come across as an angry young blogger, there’s also a lot of humour and incredibly well-argued pieces on his blog.

This could all be worked out in half an hour, although if I’m pitching to bloggers, I like to spend at least a week reading around their writings to get a good feel for the site – it helps if you know who you’re pitching to. And the better you know your blogger, the better – and, more importantly – and more relevant it’ll be.

It’s not rocket science. It’s simply modifying dealings with journalists and bringing them into a more Web 2.0 way of working. And if you’re scared of having your pitch torn to pieces on a blog, I’d suggest you lack confidence in said pitch. If it’s well-written, well-researched and you’ve taken time to read and appreciate the blog, life should be a lot smoother.

Bloggers are usually as good as journalists at spotting bad PR. The difference is bloggers have an instant medium to detail the worst examples of PR. Journalists tend not to (although there are a few instances in my journalism career where the PR was so bad that blogging about it would have been very cathartic).

Some may be scared by this. Personally, I think it’s a great reason for all PR professionals to use the web as an excuse to up their game, assuming they haven’t already.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Devil's Kitchen, pitching to bloggers, PR

Following on from my rather lengthy thoughts on best PR / blogging practice, here’s a couple of excellent posts on the subject that should be a must read for any PR bod who’s remotely thinking of getting in touch with bloggers.

First up, Vero has an open letter to all PRs from a blogger’s perspective. And it’s a bit humbling to read, because I’m sure I’ve done a few of the don’ts in my time. But, again, a lot of this stuff isn’t rocket science – it’s just good PR that doesn’t differ wildly from how you’d work with journalists, other than a bit of tweaking and knowing the blogger or blog you’re pitching to.

I’m strongly tempted to print out the post and pin it to the water cooler at work.

Secondly, Catwalk Queen’s Gemma Cartwright follows up Vero’s post with a few of her own experiences and a very thoughtful tone. Again, it’s the kind of thing PR-folk should read and take note, and this paragraph is pins much of the debate spot on:

“By nature, bloggers write opinions, they’re honest and they don’t hold back. The freedom of blogging vs print media is what appealed to me in the first place. I know we’re a bit scary because we won’t pander to people quite so easily. We’re also a bit contradictory. We want to be treated with the same respect as press, but at the same time, we don’t want to be treated like press. We want to be recognised for what we are. A new breed of writers who bring together old skills and new ideas in order to deliver content in a new way.”

And any company that, in the words of Gemma, ‘doesn’t do online’ is on a hiding to nothing. If ignoring a huge swathe of people who are interested in your product is part of your PR strategy, fine. But don’t start complaining when you realise nobody is talking about your product.

Ok, so perhaps that’s a little harsh, but with consumers and audiences increasingly fragmenting and traditional media in the midst of a huge upheaval in working and communicating methods, then traditional companies need to be looking at experimenting (although, in all honesty, this is hardly experimenting) by contacting bloggers or engaging with people who want to talk about their brand.

It’s not scary, it’s not hard, and most people will realise – again, to quote Gemma – that you’re just doing your job. And if you do it well, they’ll respond accordingly.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: blogging, Catwalk Queen, Gemma Cartwright, pitching to bloggers, PR, Vero