On the many people spam and don’t care point and Chris’s good/bad pr issue, one of the key reasons why we have structured the campaign in what a few people seem to consider a provocative, or even over the top way, was to try and get the attention of enough people to hopefully bring the debate into a broader arena. To date (particularly in the UK) it has been limited to the odd post by a journalist/blogger that gets a bit of attention but no real constructive discussion, and more importantly action, occurs. Our hope with this campaign is that enough people will get behind it to mean that we can at least establish what the majority on all sides – PRs, journalists, bloggers, service providers – think is acceptable when it comes to press release activity. Then those who *do* want to be sufficiently relevant can understand what they need to do – which obviously includes us by the way, already primed for the “you’re not perfect” shots across the bows

Perhaps this is all rather naive of us. Only time will tell….

Thanks again.
Adam

Having been a journalist and seen the press release spam, I have never relied on media lists and we always seek out personal contacts for our clients.

And sorry, if it isn’t news then we will not produce the press release. We’ve even lost clients on this stance – I’d tell you what happened to them, but never get to read about them! If you ensure it is relevant and newsworthy it will always get a good reception.

Sometimes you have to explain to clients the perils of ending up with an email rule determining everything from a certain address will be deleted. After all, journalists know how to use Outlook too. Keep sending PR spam that is what will happen – and then it doesn’t matter how good your story is!

Just as with marketing to prospects, if you gain permission to send press releases they will be much better received and better still, far more likely to be used.

Of course, this is just the start of a beautiful relationship, one that played right will see the journalists calling the client when they have space or need a specific quote.

Would happily sign up to a bill of rights that we are already pretty much following.

As someone who works as both PR and journalist I get some h-o-r-r-e-n-d-o-u-s pitches – mostly because inexperienced, junior staffers have been charged with pitching and often armed without the training.

But then even with the plethora of media training out there – often from journalists – nothing seems to be changing. We had this debate 10 years ago, 5 years ago, yesterday. We’ll have it tomorrow, 5 years time and 10 years time…

I blogged about it recently here http://bit.ly/b7kGA3

At the end of the day, crap PR is good for good PR agencies, as they can stand out and build trust, and the crap PR firms will (hopefully) wither and die. PR won’t, however, as journalists rely on PR for most of their leads, copy and access, even though many will never admit that.