Praxis Makes Perfect

1)      The single most important factor in any pitch is your operating assumption. PR practitioners must never presume that because a reporter has an e-mail address it means she wants to be spammed with your press release. Simply being included in someone’s database does not constitute agreement to be spammed.

 I used to be an editor and writer with The Associated Press and The Seattle Times. Getting unsolicited press releases was, and remains, part of the job for most journalists (and other influencers, such as analysts). But if you listen to many major-market reporters—and, especially, tech reporters—it’s plain they’re being inundated and that many of them resent receiving mistargeted pitches. As a result, an increasing number of them don’t want to be sent anything they don’t request.

You will almost always get a better reception if the journalist you’re pitching already knows you. Ideally, every PR practitioner should introduce herself to each person on her media list, briefly describe the industry news which her client or employer can provide, and learn whether the journalist would like to be contacted in the future. And all of this should happen before any initial pitch is even attempted. Be sure to ask, in your initial inquiry, whether attachments (and what kind) are preferred (vs. body copy only), and whether HTML e-mail is OK.

2)      In terms of pitch mechanics, the most critical element of your e-mail itself is that it must have an engaging subject line. The greatest pitch in the world won’t work if your e-mail doesn’t get opened. Crafting engaging subject lines that lead to opening your e-mail requires considerable skill. To be effective, subject lines need to be as enticingly short as possible. I would never use a hedline from a press release, since it would fill up the subject line’s entire available space.

I can’t begin to count the number of clients and employers I’ve met who simply send something labeled “News release from (Company X),” “(X) announces (Y)” or even just “News announcement.” If you can’t distill what makes your pitch interesting, intriguing, different, unique and/or newsworthy into a subject line of 8-10 words, then your press release hed probably isn’t very good, either, and you obviously haven’t mastered your pitch.

If you don’t yet know the journalist, using her name in the subject line will certainly catch her eye. Identifying her column by name is also effective. Thus: “Maggie, here’s a great product item for your ‘Tech Talk’ column.”

3)      What most companies and organizations fail to grasp is that they can’t possibly hope to succeed with a generic announcement sent to everyone on the media list. The “perfect pitch” is actually a series of pitches customized for different media outlets, reflecting different target audiences, and personalized to particular writers or editors.

 EXAMPLE:

 If your announcement is about the nation’s biggest research study into ADHD and student performance, and you’re only targeting general news media to reach parents and students, you’re missing out on dozens of corollary targets:

You also will want to target:

• Media outlets that reach pediatricians, nurses, and mental-health professionals
• Family & child counselors and other student-assistance referral sources
• Community referral/resource providers (churches, community-service centers, public-health agencies, youth and family-service centers, youth clubs)
• Educators (public & private, from elementary to university) and national teacher associations
• Charter schools
• Vocational schools
• Distance-learning institutions
• PTAs
• Home-schooling families
• Parenting-support organizations
• Student associations
• Sororities & fraternities
• Alumni associations
• Nonprofit children’s organizations & associations
• ADHD coaches & organizations, and the learning-disability community
• Selected government agencies dealing with education and disability

Obviously, a single pitch will not work with such widely divergent audiences.

4)      Your pitch also needs to be customized in terms of what you’re offering and to whom.

You may be trying to interest TV stations and programs in the video you can make available to them (by providing teasers on YouTube, or password-protected access to your Web site) or interview subjects who’ll make for good television, but your approach to radio interviews will be different. You might offer a guest column or first-person story to a magazine or Web site, but while your online targets will be able to take anything you offer immediately, periodicals often have six-month lead times, so your pitch may have to be seasonally adjusted. Your success in pitching a major news outlet will be greater if you can tie into subjects already in the news.

With the exception of breaking news of universal interest, no single, generic pitch can possibly work for all these different target audiences and media. Just as you would customize a resume to apply for different positions with different employers, you will need to craft slightly different pitches for different audiences; customize the pitches for particular media (e.g., TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, online); and then personalize selected pitches to particular individuals to reflect their tastes, interests and previous reporting.

Every pitch needs to explicitly state what section of the publication, broadcast or site you think the story is the best fit for, and why. (IOW, why the outlet’s audience will care.) Throwing in how your story relates to previous coverage is a good idea, as well.

5)      As a general rule, you should never send a press release in the body copy, and for God’s sake never send it as an attachment. (Some journalists, it should be noted—especially those in smaller markets or organizations—have no problem with releases as body copy; your mileage may vary.) Simply include a link to the release on your site’s Press Center section—which had better be loaded already with all the material any journalist could ever want about your company.

Your two-graf pitch should cover all the newsworthy reasons the recipient, and her audience(s), should be interested in your story. The goal of your pitch should be nothing more than to get the journalist to click on the link. You want the journalist to read the announcement at your site, where she can browse for additional info, decide to do the story, and find all the contact info she requires.

6)      Something frequently overlooked by most PR practitioners is composing your e-mail for how it will display in AutoPreview or Reading Pane modes. Front-loading your e-mail with your best stuff may be the only way to hook the interest of journalists who have configured their arriving messages to display using these e-mail features. (Although the security-conscious ones disable such features to avoid opening Web bugs and viruses.) Writing copy for AutoPreview forces you to refine your pitch to its most important elements—all displayed in just two lines.

7)      The subject line isn’t the only element of your e-mail routing that needs careful attention. The From field should match the “about” in your subject line as well as your body copy. If your message is about Company X, don’t send it with a “From” address for Company Z, even if Z owns X. Set up separate e-mail accounts for each division of your corporation that will engage in outreach to influencers.

Always send your pitches to individuals instead of sending the same e-mail to multiple targets via the Correspondence Copy (cc: ) field. Some reporters won’t want to cover anything that is likely to be published by dozens of competitors. (For truly hard, breaking news, this is not a consideration; everyone will want your story.) Others will be irritated that you have shared what may be their private e-mail address with strangers.

8)      Many people still write their e-mails in text format. When e-mailing a stranger, do not assume she prefers or uses HTML format. Many corporations refuse to jeopardize their network’s security by permitting employees to open unsolicited attachments, which may contain viruses, and often set their e-mail system to display HTML e-mails as text (so as to strip out Web bugs and other embedded trackers). This will remove all the pretty colors, boldface, italics, underlining,different fonts and font sizes from your carefully constructed HTML work of art.

Many e-mail programs and freemail services won’t load images when an HTML message is opened from an unknown address, especially if your message unintentionally meets their spam parameters. If you don’t want to take the time to inquire which format a journalist prefers (or send non-pitch messages to discover which format she uses in her reply), then compose your e-mail in text.

9)      Some journalists haven’t bothered to set their e-mail programs to authorize returning “Read” (opened) receipts as a default for all arriving messages. If you have attached a Read receipt request to your e-mail, when it’s opened a notification dialog box may appear, forcing the recipient to authorize or reject your request before she can resume work. For this reason, many practitioners eschew Read receipts so as to avoid irritating recipients.

In contrast, “Delivered” receipts are automatically returned by the recipient’s server, so unless your recipient has specifically disabled them in her e-mail program, you will be able to receive them without the recipient’s knowledge. Of course, if they haven’t disabled delivery receipts, sending an e-mail with one requested may generate the same notification dialog box. The trade-off you must balance is that requesting delivery receipts enables you to get automatic responses indicating whenever a recipient has deleted your e-mail unopened.

10)    Finally, your perfect pitch will be useless if you don’t double-check the contact info on your media list. In 22 years, I have yet to encounter a client or employer’s media list—especially those created from commercial databases (Vocus, Cision, et. al.)—that has not contained a significant number of wildly inappropriate inclusions and inaccurate listings.

In these times of shrinking newsrooms, with sudden reorganizations, mass lay-offs and early-retirement buyouts, the information contained in any subscription-media database is potentially already out-of-date. Journalists might get briefly sick, go on medical leave or vacation, or take a sabbatical or fellowship. They could be reassigned, fired, quit or retire.

You only have a single opportunity to make a great first impression with a reporter. Thus, any pitching campaign needs to verify—before the first call is made or e-mail sent—every name on the list, along with its spelling (often pronunciation too), proper title, beat, contact info and pitching preference. You can’t always trust the staff directories on media outlets’ Web sites, either, so you’ll have to make fone calls.

Any PR practitioner who fails to verify each person on her inherited media list, or a freshly generated, database-derived list, is doing a disservice to her client or employer that could have significant impacts on a PR initiative or campaign. If all this sounds like too much work, well—that’s why God made interns (and Asst. A/E’s).