ATTN Journalists: I Feel Your Pain

In the PR Industry, we often hear about PR flacks sending out mass emails to reporters hoping that a few people will pick up on their boring pitch. I have always tried to avoid spamming reporters with untargeted pitches, but I've never truly been able to empathize with them until now.

What happened?

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to start up my own website. I purchased a domain, but then soon realized I would need some HTML and CSS help. I decided to put up a short and specific ad on Craigslist with what I wanted: HTML design help and a flat rate of $50 for the work put in.

What did I receive?

To date, I've had over 50 responses to the brief ad...and most of them are entirely irrelevant to what I posted. As they came pouring in I was left wondering "Didn't these people read my ad? Why are 90% of these emails copy & paste jobs?"

Most responses:
I would estimate that about 90% of the respondents saw that I was looking for web design help didn't read the rest of the ad. They copy and pasted their pitch and sent it on over to me. Most of them charge anywhere from $300 to $3000 per web page built. Does that sound like something I would be interested in? Also, a few of these people who sent me bad pitches followed up with again after I didn't respond to them. If I was interested in a $1500 web page, believe me I would have responded.

Another 5% sent me an email that was literally spam or completely irrelevant. Only 5% of the emails I received were actually genuine people who read my ad and responded sincerely.

The moral of this story should be obvious to all PR people: don't spam journalists. Keep crying wolf by sending journalists untargeted pitches and by the time you have a solid pitch for them, you will probably be on the black list.


Take this advice from Peter Shankman, which he gives before you join his HARO list:
Next: This is really the only thing I ask: By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you'll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn't send the response.

In the end, we could probably all stand to do this a bit more, huh?

Random Social Media Thoughts

A collection of my social media thoughts for the day:

- It is weird to think that we are engaged in the first election since YouTube's creation. It has been heavily utilized by most campaigns. Most video hits: probably Obama. Most YouTube comments: definitely Ron Paul. For a while it was almost impossible to look at any popular video without a Ron Paul supporter commenting on it.

- Facebook is going the way of MySpam...oops, I mean MySpace. Too many useless applications and now comes a complete revamp of the website along with a slew of spam. I see the temptation for Facebook to converge and become everything social media, but instead I wish they would follow the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid, as in we didn't really need all the 3rd party apps and all that junk).

- Another victim of spam - YouTube. I remember not too long ago when I would check the daily top videos on YouTube and find a collection of unique, creative, and often hilarious videos. Check the most viewed videos today and you will find about 50% of the titles aren't in English, a handful of videos are Japanese cartoons, and the rest are spam or ads for websites. Maybe 10 videos out of the top 100 are now worth watching.

- Pandora might get shut down soon. They are paying outrageous royalties and can't get out of the red. If they do get shut down by the RIAA, expect an uproar from the over 1 million daily users of Pandora.

- Apple still needs to get a better control of the App Store. Only a few applications are released every week and the ones that get publicized aren't that great. Btw, who gave the clearance for the I am Rich application?

- Something will replace MySpace as a music site soon. Currently, MySpace is repeatedly being pigeonholed as a site for 3 different types of people: musicians, spammers, and child predators. Whether it is true or not, it is repeated frequently enough to the point where people will believe it to be true. My prediction for MySpace's music predecessor? Modlife. I will give a review of the website later this week.