The PR Blacklist -- Are You On It?

A few days ago Chris Anderson, Long Tail author and Editor and Chief of Wired, called out 300 PR people for spamming his inbox with irrelevant content. Fed up with what he calls "lazy flacks" he goes on to post all these PR people's email addresses:

"I've had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it's PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers."

So yeah, he's pissed. If you're in PR you've been talking about this the past couple of days and after some thought, here's my reaction:

1.) Chris Anderson had a bad day.

All of this was probably the result of a Chris Anderson bad day. As the head of a major magazine, Anderson is pitched with every tech product under the sun every day. You would think he'd be used to it. It's in the job description. So in a way I think he overreacted, and sad that these particular people were hurt

It was great fun to take a look at all the blackballed emails, especially since we weren't on it, but sad at the same time. I'm sure most of these emails consist of junior staffers and interns who were just following orders of a misguided PR program.

I'm guessing that also included in this list are email newsletters that Anderson doesn't remember signing up for. One I caught was the Marketing Sherpa domain, a newsletter that I have praised multiple times on this blog for its insightful articles. We all have newsletters that we sign up for and forget about. On this bad day, I'm guessing that alot of the good got thrown out with the bad.

2.) But Chris Anderson was probably right.

Even if he was having a bad day and flew off the handle, he's probably right. Even when I worked as a reporter at a tiny local paper in the suburbs, we would get weird, irrelevant press releases. I can only imagine what the editor in chief of Wired receives.

For the most part I like to believe that we PR people do good research to find out the right people to talk to at the given outlet, but sometimes we miss. Maybe you wrote just one article on U.S. homes and we pegged you as a real estate writer. Maybe you're an editor at an outlet we know is right for the story, but can't find a writer. In those situations, let me say, "I'm sorry, and we'll work harder next time."

But I don't think these are the people that Anderson is talking about. What he's talking about are people that just blast out press releases with no relevancy and hope for the best. The law of large numbers dictates they are going to get some hits, but this isn't an effective method. There are many people commenting on Anderson's post that are outraged that these emails have been posted. But I don't want to defend them. Now they've learned a valuable lesson and they won't do it again.

Our goal as PR people is to connect our story to the right journalist. If you can't figure out a story angle to fit the journalist, you don't pitch them. At least that's our goal.

So in summary, PR pitching can be tough but it's like anything else in marketing. Rule number one: know your audience. That's a valuable lesson that these 300 PR people learned the hard way.