PR 101

No, your attached information would not be useful for my events/going out pages… because I don’t have any! It should be PR 101 but somehow the releases keep coming and it is driving me crazy.

This newsletter is brought to you by this morning’s inbox – so I thought I’d just recap a few ‘golden rules’ that I think might be useful.

1 – Read the publications/websites you are pitching to and if you don’t have time to look at everything, share the load with colleagues and have a regular debrief on who’s running what kind of feature and what they don’t cover (just as important).

2 – Make a list of their regular slots and who looks after them so you are pitching to the right person. If it’s not listed, make a call to find out.

3 – Get that person’s name right. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal and I’ve been called pretty much everything from Linda to Mark (!) but it does show a lack of attention to detail which you might not want as your calling card.

4 – Try not to send out releases at or before about 10am. This is for your benefit, as most features teams will still be on their way to work, might glance at on the bus and never go back to their opened emails. Those on news teams will be in or preparing for morning ideas meetings/conferences and are flat out … In both instances, better to catch them mid-morning when they’ve had coffee and dealt with the urgent stuff and are more open to pitches.

5 – Take a silence as a ‘no, unless there is a really compelling reason to chase. Alas, with smaller staffs and bigger workloads, even the most polite of journalists struggles to get back to everyone and everything.

Sorry, but that’s the reality – but if you’ve got good intel on who’s interested in what, it should save you time and energy in the first place.