The PR Lessons of a Clueless Blog Pitch

The majority of the PR industry continues to log behind in the blogosphere, seemingly unconvinced that the influential new medium is worth learning about.

Those who are looking at blogs are also pitching them, and from what I've seen their approach is disastrous. But not surprising. (Sigh.)

Here's a sample email PR agency pitch (with names changed to protect the guilty) that a blogger associate of mine got the other day. It began like this:

Time to kick off with online advergame specialist [Joe's] latest game for [phone company]. See if you can connect up and down field for a few TDs with QB [John Doe].

It pointed to a URL where the game could be played and went on to give the usual formulaic PR detritus about the company. To its credit, it was short and it had no attachments.

However, this is exactly the kind of pitch traditional journalists complain about. So why, oh why, would bloggers, who tend to be snarky and often downright rude about PR, want to see this pitch?

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B.L. Ochman is a social media marketing strategist for S&P 500 companies, including McGraw Hill, IBM, Cendant, and American Greetings. She publishes What's Next Blog and Ethics Crisis, where readers can confess their worst ethics transgressions and others can rate them on a scale of one to ten. She also blogs for MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog.