Tag Archive for ‘press release’ at PRactical Relations

There is nothing wrong with being friendly in your emails, friendly people are far more approachable and memorable. However, beware of pretending that the journalist you are emailing is suddenly your best mate.

A good example of a bad attempt to build rapport
Here is an example of an over-familiar PR pitch that an editor forwarded to me yesterday:

Greetings [editor’s name], I hope you had a great weekend - [partner’s name] and I certainly did! We had no commitments and just lazed away - a one in a million break.

The following [client] release is for your consideration, some pics are attached,

Regards, [name]

This sounds like a brief and friendly email, something that you would expect to receive from a friend. The only problem is that the editor does not know this PR practitioner and the ice-breaker introduction - the personalised little note about the PR person’s weekend - comes across as insincere. To make it worse, the editor’s colleague received the same email, with the same “personalised” note.

I’m sure that the intention of this PR person was to genuinely build rapport, but unfortunately it was perceived very differently. Here’s what the editor felt about it:

“Why don’t PRs just cut the nonsense and get down to business? Do they really think we are stupid enough to feel special with a note like this.”

Building relationships
If your aim is to build a relationship with a journalist (which it should be), don’t send her the same message that you send to every other journalist on your list. You build a relationship with one person at a time.

The best way to build a relationship though, is to do your research and send the journalist something that is truly useful and relevant to him or her. If you continue to do that, you will build a relationship on trust, which is far stronger than a relationship based on chatting about what you did over the weekend.

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I’ve just finished a phone call with an editor covering the marketing and media industry in South Africa. She received a press release this week from a PR practitioner where 60 email addresses were included in the recipient list, for all to see. 60! Naturally, the editor said that she didn’t bother to read any further, it was simply deleted without remorse.

Think of this from a journalist’s perspective. If you see that a media release has been sent to 20, 30 or 60 (gasp!) other people covering your beat and industry, what thoughts would possibly be going through your mind? Probably something like this: “if Sally, Susan and Peter are covering this, then why should I bother?”

Personalised and exclusive
A journalist will not use your media release if there is a chance that another competing magazine or newspaper will cover the same story, or at least the same angle of the story. That’s why journalists love exclusives. It gives them a chance to give their readers something unique, something that their target audience can’t read, hear or view anywhere else.

Many PR companies aim to get as much coverage as possible and will send the media release to as many people as possible (including those who left the publication two years ago). But if you’re employing the “spray-and-pray” method to achieve this, then you’re probably wondering why you get no coverage at all.

Well, now you know.

And don’t try the BCC tactic. Journalists receive enough emails every day to spot the personalised emails from the … well, let’s just call it what it is: PR spam.

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