Understanding PR Spam
A huge part of publicity success is knowing precisely who your target journalists are, and anticipating what they're going to write about next. These are such obvious components to the process that it's generally pretty perplexing why so many PR folks spam media targets with irrelevant email pitches and phone calls (and understandable why publications / blogs are increasingly hostile in their response).
But while you can chalk up a lot of the spam to sheer laziness and lack of research, there's another very simple explanation to why there's so much PR spam out there: the majority of media outreach is done by very junior-level PR staffers. Consider a recent report on PR firm operating profits that cited an average operating profit of 22% based on an average monthly minimum fee of about $10,000. The only way to hit those margins (in a business where labor costs are by FAR the biggest operating expense) is to staff accounts with fresh college grads.
And green PR folks (especially in jargon-heavy domains like IT) are in a deficit position when they build their target media lists for announcements, because they generally don't have the necessary context to navigate the various hurdles that can make building a solid target list challenging:
- Bad search indexing -- Many trade publications' site search indices are still in the dark ages (even if you know precisely what you're looking for).
- PR tools of limited value -- Google News does not capture a number of domain-specific publications (nor does Lexis). MediaMap's info is an inch deep and a mile wide, but yields precious few actual "insights" about journalists (not to mention the fact that it's so expansive that by the time it's updated on an annual basis, a good % of it is already outdated). PR folks that strictly leverage these to do their research (rather than manually going to each individual publication and doing fresh research) miss a number of opportunities, and can also retrieve some false positives.
- Editorial calendars often of minimal use -- There's a huge disparity between how much / little different publications abide by editorial calendars. Network World is an example of a publication that puts out a very rich set of data (link to current editorial calendar) about its upcoming features, with direct contact info, etc. (and they are very responsive to pitches that are a fit). eWeek's edit cal is generally very well updated / useful as well. But those are the exceptions. Many publications infrequently update their editorial calendars, provide incorrect contact info for the respective story authors, or otherwise fail to make the editorial calendar of substantial value.
- Frequent turnover at publications -- Publishing is a tough business. Reporting wages are low, and attrition is high. Just when you think you've got everything figured out, the top three folks you knew covering x- subject matter have moved on to something new.
- Blurry lines between beats -- Some beats can be neatly compartmentalized (like "sports" or "living"). But across the board, there is tremendous crossover in subject matters, where certain beat reports write about ancillary themes that bleed into other beats.
Anyone who's been in a job where unsolicited sales emails and calls infringes on productivity can understand why journalists would be frustrated. At the same time, a lot of these guys that are crying foul on spam have gotten some great tips from PR folks in the past (that contributed to their stories) ... and I think sifting through the bad to get to the good is part of the territory. One journalist's PR spam is another journalist's filet mignon.
(image by dave_graham'sphotostream on flickr creative commons)
(tasteless caption by Travis Van)