Stage Two Consulting

Over the past few years as “the blogosphere” has grown and evolved, we’ve seen many bloggers move from “desperate to get attention” to “so ridiculously swamped they can’t take pitches anymore”.  Tom Foremski and Scoble both tried a Facebook-only pitch mode for a while (neither lasted), Marshall Kirkpatrick recommends RSS pitches (read Matt Craven’s thoughts and our own response here) and Mashable has their “what not to do” list as well.  This is all part of dealing with new media technologies and PR, which are generally at inherent conflicts with each other.

Until extremely recently, PR was mostly about using lists of press and blasting them with updates.  Relationships were always key, but the system of Draft Release, Create Embargo, Blast tended to work pretty well.  Today, it’s clearly not that easy.  There is so much noise out there it’s almost impossible to distinguish yourself, even when you have interesting news (hence my post on positioning).  Relationships are more important than ever, and doing The Blast is more likely to backfire than it is to independently generate widespread awareness.  But the blame for all this should not just be aimed at the PR firms, I believe bloggers and journalists have some responsibility for the quagmire as well.

Most blogs have some form of “contact us” or “send us news” page or email address readily available.  The reality is those emails tend to get put into the lowest priority bins, if not ignored altogether.  And that’s hardly fair.  In my opinion a news organization, be it an individual blogger or a mega publication, has the duty to receive incoming pitches from anyone.  But they also retain the right on their preference of the nature, content, and style of those pitches.

In addition to some of the examples above, I believe Stowe Boyd’s request for “being twitpitched” is an excellent way to step up to the table.  He labeled the post “how to pitch me” on his blog, and as a result, anyone who wants to pitch him now has a simple and straightforward mechanism to do so.  In order to practice what I’m preaching, on my LIVEdigitally blog I just wrote a “How To Pitch Us” page, and added it to my primary navigation links.  I hope to see many other bloggers follow this type of a path, as its so easy to complain about the noise yet IMHO equally easy to do something about it.