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Guest Column

Pet Peeves:

Top Three Ways PR People Annoy the Heck out of Journalists

by Anne Holland, MarketingSherpa.com

Ever heard of 'Whack-a-Flack'? It's an online game where journalists get to pelt hapless cartoon characterizations of PR pros with pointy paper airplanes made out of bad press releases.

More than 7,000 journalists, reporters and writers have played the game · repeatedly · since it launched last year. Why?

Stress relief.

As the Managing Editor of an email newsletter entitled 'MarketingFame', I've interviewed more than two-dozen other journalists to learn what PR people do that makes them so annoyed that they might turn to games such as Whack-a-Flack. Our interviews have included journalists at The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, The New York Times and Business 2.0. Here's how PR people make their jobs miserable:

Pet Peeve #1: You've never read, never even glanced at my publication before you pitch us.

You know how annoying email spammers are? That's how journalists feel about PR people who pitch stories that aren't remotely connected to their area of coverage. It happens every day. All day long.

Pet Peeve #2: You're calling to see if I got your press release ok

As you know when you create press releases, writing is difficult. It's even harder when the phone rings interrupting your train of thought every five minutes. And when that call is from a PR person saying, "I just wanted to check that you got my release alright" which you know is a completely made up excuse so they can tell their client "Oh yes I contacted the journalist personally", you begin to see red.

At the very least have better excuse for calling. Maybe some interesting factoid that wasn't in the release itself?

Pet Peeve #3: How the H**L can I contact you????

After a while journalists begin to get a siege mentality about all the press releases and emailed pitches and phone calls hurled at them constantly all day long. (Picture yourself being in a snow fight where a whole lot of kids gang up on you and pummel you with snowballs into the ground.) Then the really infuriating part of their job begins·.

· they have to contact one of your client's or company executives for an interview.

The journalist immediately goes to your company (or client's) Web site to figure out who to contact. Almost guaranteed one of the following happens:

	It takes more than *three clicks* from the home page to find a press contact.
	The press contact *only has a phone number*, no email (which is hard for journalists in unusual time zones, or those who work odd hours from home, which is more than you think.)
	The press number *goes to an individual's voicemail* and there are no further instructions if the journalist is on deadline or in a different time zone (or both.)
	The press email is an *anonymous address* such as "pr@" which journalists don't trust will be answered in a timely manner (with darned good reason.)
	There is *no press contact*. There is only an investor relations contact who isn't interested in helping press for other stories.
	Press *contact info is stripped off* of press releases before they are posted to the Web site. Why, no one knows, but this idiotic practice is practically universal.
	The press contact, if reachable (a miracle!) *acts all snooty*. We don't know if we can bother ask one of our busy execs to speak with you. How many readers did you say you had again?

Aside from these three biggies, journalists have confided lots of smaller pet peeves to me. Being emailed press releases as attachments (yuck); being emailed press releases with delete-me-now subject lines such as "press release"; being offered great exclusive-sounding stories only to see the same item in a competitor's publication soon afterwards; etc.

But, if you avoid the three biggies youâre allowed a little more leeway. Veins are not popping out on journalist's foreheads when they hear your name.

And if you're planning on being in PR for a while, remember that many of the journalists

you annoy today will be the exact same people you have to pitch again tomorrow. Come on guys, this is not rocket science. This is relationship building.

Anne Holland, Managing Editor

MarketingSherpa's MarketingFAME

http://www.marketingfame.com

Anne Holland originally started out on "the dark side" as a corporate marketer for Janes, Phillips and McGraw Hill. Now she's an award-winning journalist with MarketingSherpa, which has been praised by Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge Site, The Economist, AdBumb, Tenagra, and Entrepreneur.com as one of the best know-how resources on marketing online. Holland is a frequent speaker at major industry events, including PRSA, @d:tech and DMA conferences.

MarketingSherpa, Inc. is a media company publishing useful news, Case Studies, and best practices data about Internet and integrated marketing for advertising, marketing and PR professionals.

Click here to learn more about MarketingSherpa and MarketingFAME.

Submit your "Guest Column" today directly to our staff at Tjfr@NewsBios.com.

August 13, 2002

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