How Not to Pitch a Blogger, #648
Email just received from a PR agency:
"Dear Richard,
Below, please find a press release from Hyster Company presenting the Hyster® Fortis® line of lift trucks. The Hyster Fortis product line represents a transformation in the way lift trucks are designed, built and acquired. Incorporating proven design processes and systems, each Fortis lift truck is offered with multiple powertrain configurations to meet specific application requirements and business objectives and to optimize productivity, dependability and cost of operations.
We thought Read/WriteWeb readers would find this news of interest."
Thanks Hyster!! For the edification of Read/WriteWeb readers, here is an image of the afore-mentioned lift truck:
Lift Trucks 2.0
(normal RWW service will now resume...)
UPDATE: Nick asked a good - and serious - question in the comments: "So what exactly would you like to see when it comes to a pitch from a small company looking to inform you about a relevant product or service your readers may find useful?"
It's a great question and deserves a response, because I recognize that it is difficult for a smallco to get on our radar. So here's my reply to Nick and all other startups pitching us:
Relevancy is obviously a key point, but one thing small companies can also do is to send us a unique angle. Often companies will send the same pitch to everyone - and in those cases unless a blog is first to post, there's usually not much for other blogs to post about.
Also bear in mind that RWW is an analysis blog, so we like to hear about your industry as a whole and how you fit in -- i.e. give us some context.
Those are a couple of tips, but also bear in mind that we get a lot of pitches daily and there's no way we can look into them all, or even reply to your email. I wish there was a way we could, but we have limited resources and because we are an analysis blog we have to pick and choose our subjects -- then analyse them, which takes time. So I imagine it's harder for PR companies to pitch RWW, because we are necessarily selective (i.e. we don't copy and paste PR multiple times a day, like some tech blogs).
All that said, also I recommend you email tips@readwriteweb.com and not my personal email, as the tips address reaches all our authors (me included).
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If ever a single "WTF" as a comment was appropriate, now would be the time.
Name the PR agency so we may commence beating them over the head with a cluestick.
I won't name names, but I do give them points for spelling both my name and our site name correctly :-)
And yet, you posted it, and as you speak RWW readers are googling "Hyster Fortis." I'd say this particular PR campaign was a success. ;)
LOL! I saw Marshall's Tweet about this, but I didn't think you guys were actually going to post it! Awesome.
So what exactly would you like to see when it comes to a pitch from a small company looking to inform you about a relevant product or service your readers may find useful?
I know I've sent some info (and yes, it was much more relevant), and got no response, not even a "Sorry, your product sucks" reply. I would have actually welcomed that versus the indifference.
Well, Hyster IS a great name for a Web company. Or maybe Hystr.
At least this pitch didn't have the tracking in the email =) Nice of you not to include name and PR agency.
Nick (comment #5), you're right there's a serious side to this. Relevancy is obviously a key point, but one thing small companies can also do is to send us a unique angle. Often companies will send the same pitch to everyone - and in those cases unless a blog is first to post, there's usually not much for other blogs to post about.
Also bear in mind that RWW is an analysis blog, so we like to hear about your industry as a whole and how you fit in -- i.e. give us some context.
Those are a couple of tips, but also bear in mind that we get a lot of pitches daily and there's no way we can look into them all, or even reply to your email. I wish there was a way we could, but we have limited resources and because we are an analysis blog we have to pick and choose our subjects -- then analyse them, which takes time. So I imagine it's harder for PR companies to pitch RWW, because we are necessarily selective (i.e. we don't copy and paste PR multiple times a day, like some tech blogs).
All that said, also I recommend you email tips@readwriteweb.com and not my personal email, as the tips address reaches all our authors (me included).
I think your plan to subtly dissuade PR agencies from sending you irrelevant announcements by actually publishing those announcements verbatim, with photos - and without any explicit criticism - is a good one. Soon, the word will ring out on Madison Avenue - "Don't send press releases to ReadWrite web - they print 'em!"
But I'm just not sure it will scale.
Jay, I'm not sure the conversion rate will be what they expected ;-)
Richard - I know you are in the outback, but here in the states, those type of moving vehicles are used to move startups around when they are acquired, move iphones from unlock point to unlock point and (the use in the picture) is to get diggs on a story - you get as many as you can on the pallet and then you can move up to a bigger vehicle and so forth. So the PR person was well within his or her means to contact you.
LOL, nice one Allen! :-)
Tell them to outfit this piece of machinery with FB's Beacon. Watch this thing hit the top of Techmeme.
We've recently been looking into the mechanics of PR as we're mindful of making mistakes, and want to get off on the right foot, and digging around the murky world of PR unearthed some interesting articles, including this one by Chris Anderson of Wired:
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/10/sorry-pr-people.html
After some further digging it seems this phenomenon is on the increase, so we coined the term: spitching (spam + pitching), or sPRam:
http://www.travelinpapers.com/blog/2007/11/23/stop-spitching/
Garri, I love the term "spitching"!
See if they'll send you a test unit, and then let Marshall drive it around.
The Hyster vehicles might be even more useful if they were shipped with a calendar app:
Hyster/ical
Thanks for addressing my comment Richard. I definitely understand that you must get a ton of stuff to sort through on a daily basis, but from the opposite end (the small co. end) it can also be a mountain to climb in a different way. It often seems like you are yelling at the top of lungs and no one is listening -- even if you are saying something relevant and even useful -- all while blogs talk about the same few companies or topics.
But the tips you mentioned are definitely helpful. I was being a little snarky even though I was asking a serious question, so I'm glad you took it seriously.
Guys I found this hilarious, nice one. As a South African I can add this little tidbit of trivia: in Afrikaans (dialect of Dutch) the word for a lift (elevator) is hyser, hyskraan would be the big construction cranes and forklift is hysvurk. So I presume the company founders have some Dutch heritage.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! LOL - that's a sweeeeeeeeeet forklift. :D
Thanks... now I don't have to watch my Tivo'd reruns of last month's Jon Stewart that aired last night for my morning laugh!
either way, if you publish it here, then they have reached the RRW readers :)
This is classic!
This is an interesting problem. The art of pitching a story is getting lost. (And I don't profess to being skillful at it.)
As blogs become more important, pitching to blogs becomes more important than becomes essential. But the cost to pitch a blog is very low (send an email to the tips file). So people can mistakenly think that pitching 100 blogers is better than accurately pitching the right 5 bloggers.
Of course, I'll probably forget what I wrote and next week, I'll spitch a 100 bloggers. ;-)
Hey, they were successful in their pitch, no?
No, they weren't successful. I read RWW to glean information about "how to" in terms of my own blogs and have no interest whatsoever in forklift trucks. My information brokerage may have a lot of paper (what librarian doesn't keep paper as well as electronic information?) but I sure don't need a truck to shift it!