While digging a little deeper into Stowe Boyd’s writings, following his post about Micro PR (and my response, PR Pitch Spam – An Inconvenient Truth), I found a reference to this Uptake blog post: Elliot Ng on MicroPR.
Elliot’s post offers a compendium on how top bloggers like to be pitched.
As you can see, there is quite a bit of diversity: Jane likes email, Joe hates email, most eschew Facebook pitches, some love Twitter. Here’s an excerpt:
Do you really think companies are going to remember to pitch Marshall at ReadWriteWeb via RSS and Stowe Boyd by TwitPitch and Scoble by Facebook? Knowing PR companies, I know they won’t. Most of them still believe in the spray and pray method of e-mailing all contacts under the sun. There needs to be change, but making everybody jump through hoops while losing the personal engagement, exclusivity and timing won’t work …
This diversity of pitching preferences, which might seem overwhelming, actually represents an opportunity. Taking advantage of the opportunity requires a shift in thinking and approach.
The first step is to stop thinking of ourselves as pitch delivery machines. No one wants to have a conversation with someone who just talks and doesn’t even try to listen.
Second, realize that multiple channels mean many different ways to engage. Collectively, the various communications and social media channels surround people. They lend context and tone to communications. The more channels you can master, and the more you participate in the various channels, the more your communications can be on target and in context.
Frequently, multiple channels can work together (and I am not just talking about keeping after someone by email and phone, something we have proved we can do). When done right, your approach is not considered stalking (i.e. something to be avoided), or even pitching, but becomes part of the conversation.
The key to this is (as I said in my last post on the topic) relevance.
I’ll share a real world example of multi-channel engagement later this week. Meanwhile, please note that I have updated my buzz tracker to reflect increased conversations about Twitter and PR recently.
