Hearing (Persuasive) Voices

This post is a little beyond the normal purview of this blog, but I just had an idea. It's an idea that I'm sure at least ten billion other people have already had, so I'm not saying it's unique. More than a brainstorm, though, it's probably more a commentary on the highly-calibrated consumer society in which we live. Someone near my desk, I don't know who, just got a call. Apparently they didn't want to talk to the caller, and also, it seems, they didn't know how to activate the "silence" feature on the phone, because it kept ringing and ringing. But the ring was no normal ring: no, their cell phone blasted out a jazzy percussion-y song as loud as if I was standing in a two-car garage and the Boston Philharmonic was there playing their guts out.

We're talking loud.

And it got me to thinking...someday I'll bet companies find a way to allure people into uploading their marketing slogans as ringtones. Something like, "Fifteen minutes or less could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance" would be piped through, sung by Robin Thicke accompanied by a smooth jazz baseline. Or something. Over and over, Thicke would croon his pitch as adoring teenage girls let their calls go into voicemail, not wanting to interrupt his syrupy lyrics. Wait: is Robin Thicke still popular with teenage girls? I don't know. Point is: someone will figure out how to do this.

The notion reminds me of a creepy story I once read by George Saunders in his book of short stories "In Persuasion Nation" (I can't remember the title off the top of my head, but it might be "My Flamboyant Grandson"). In the story, an older man is assailed by all sorts of different advertising images as he takes his grandson to see a musical in the city. As he walks past an endless string of storefronts, a microchip in his shoe triggers holograms and aural announcements directing him to buy all manner of products. It's a not-too-distant-future look at how our consumer culture, unchecked, could wall us off in a prison of zany advertisements.

On second thought, let's keep the whole ringtone thing between you and me. I don't want it falling into the wrong hands.

Media List, Schmedia List

Have you been asked to compile a media email distribution list in the past, oh, say five years? Are you tired of getting fifty bounce-backs from a list of 55 reporters? If so, you'll understand how pointless the whole enterprise seems. In this era of newspapers and magazines shuttering in the face of a hurricane of bloggers, it's ever harder to depend on journalists remaining at the same publication from year-to-year.

Listen, I don't begrudge writers moving on to make a living, it only makes sense, but it sure makes compiling media lists an uphill battle. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, it reminds me of a dream I used to have as a kid: some unspeakably horrible black vortexy cloud would be pursuing me, chewing up the very ground beneath me, and I'd be trying to run away, but I seemed bogged down in one place, unable to move forward.

This is what compiling a media list feels like.

That's probably why I don't have that dream anymore: I already live the waking vortex nightmare of being asked to put lists together, so my subconscious is off the hook. I wish either A.) reporters were more in the habit of giving out personal email addresses (the gmail's and yahoo's of the world) or B.) that more newsrooms would assign their writers generic email addresses so that they can be used by the next writer who comes down the pike. Or does that seem like a death sentence from day 1 to be assigned such a Stepford Wives email address?

I know in this era of Facebook, everyone wants to have that warm toasty feeling of knowing the person they're emailing on some intimate-ish level, so I guess for those warm/fuzzy types, they like email addresses that make use of some part of their contact's name. But really, this practice has to end. Think of all those hours wasted researching the newest health beat reporter at Super Action News 8 that could've been used more productively.

Hopefully some publishing baron is reading this as we speak and will decide to change the paradigm.

Pitching to Reporters

Hi all, this is my first post of what I hope to be many on the field of public relations. I've been working in the field for a few years now, and feel I've accumulated enough experience to merit a humble blog. Not that I'll be commenting about what I do at my day job - I believe in a separation of church and state. No, I'll mainly be commenting on trends I see in the PR world. In the interest of full disclosure, I have a background in nonprofits, so much of what I say will be filtered through that lens.

For my inaugural post, I figured I'd tackle a discussion that's got one of my LinkedIn PR groups all a-twitter: what is the best way to pitch stories to reporters? As the guy who started the discussion notes, it used to be industry standard (in days of Charlemagne) to take reporters one hoped to develop as resources out to coffee(!) or dinner (why does this conjure images of Don Draper in my mind?) to introduce themselves.

That was before my time. I can't possibly imagine that, given the constraints on journalists' time (and I agree with the moderator on this one), any reporter would be open to this sort of face-to-face meet-up. I'm guessing that even if you'd planned to rob a bank together, the reporter would much rather rob it over Skype than waste time coming in person. The moderator asks, basically, given this landscape of crushing deadlines and scaled-back newsrooms, should we as PR folks actually even cold-call reporters? Or does email work better?

As many of the commenters to the thread mentioned, this is a tough call. Since everyone is inundated with email, it seems like an email pitch to a reporter might get lost in the shuffle. But, as I've noticed when dialing up reporters, often times, all you get is their voicemail. So what's the answer? Something I didn't see mentioned in the thread is the notion of an effective subject line. And by "effective", I mean Ninja-efficient, a gleaming throwing star that tears to the marrow of the matter. I've been trained to treat email subject lines like the Ark of the Covenant: objects of mystical beauty that, if handled incorrectly, could melt your face off.

If a reporter sees an overly-wordy subject line, i.e. one that contains too many prepositions or a cavalcade of syllables, they'll click "delete". I'm not going to launch into a clinic on how to write the perfect subject line because, like ultimate nirvana, most of us will only catch fleeting glimpses of it now and then. I'm no expert. But I do know that a solid subject line that contains "hot" or "topical" words important to journalists in a given field will at least get you a look.

Also (and please feel free to insert a "duh" here), only pitch to journalists who have written about whatever type of story it is you're pitching. This is one of those things that seems simple but requires legwork. When I first started out, I used to send out queries to anyone and everyone who had ever typed the word "health", it seemed. Embarrassingly, I even once added Malcolm Gladwell to an email distribution list before quickly deleting him at my boss' behest; somehow or other, I'd managed not to know who Gladwell was. Yes, I was an outlier.

Of course, once you've established a relationship with a reporter, it's best to call them because just like regular human beings everywhere, reporters don't like getting little bits and pieces of information in email after scanty email, which can, by our nature as professional multi-taskers, mean that emails are spaced apart by hours. Get them on the phone so they can ask you as many questions as they like.

But cold-calling reporters? In my experience, you'd have better luck getting Bruce Banner into an anger management class taught by Lex Luthor than coaxing a reporter out of the blue to cover your story by cold-calling them.