some pr companies are still caught in the past

ireland's main pr bloggers, tom murphy and piaras kelly, may have something to say about this. with numerous imminent deadlines i was working away this morning when i was interrupted by a call to my mobile from one of the big pr firms.

pr: "his this is x from y agency, i'm just ringing to see if you received the release from our client that we sent out this morning?"
me: "ah, yes, i think i saw that one alright"
pr: "ok, thanks" [hangs up]

wtf!! that is singularly one of the most annoying things a pr can do. turn on message notification if you want to be sure i got it. and anyway it's 2006 - email arrives. as some readers may know in my dim and distant past i worked in pr before making the jump to journalism (all the traffic seems to be the other way these days). back in 1994 i worked for edelman where we had one pc with a dial-up to compuserve and being the junior it was inevitably my job to ring and check that journos had got the release and to see if they needed any more info. i distinctly remember being balled out of it by the then editor of irish computer who asked me how long ago i had sent the email. about 10 minutes ago i replied in my innocence. this was of course pre-inex which meant there was limited peering between irish isps. "the f--ing thing has to bounce half way around the world before i get it, of course i haven't received it yet" was the terse response.

it seems 12 years later that some agencies are still stuck in that mode. hand on heart i have to say it makes me less inclined to deal with those companies who insist on interrupting me with a phone call rather than taking advantage of the available tools. rant over.

Comments

[Damien Mulley]

They should all have RSS feeds anyway. :)

[PaulSweeney]

John, I'm interested in knowing are their times when you DO want to receive a call from a PR Agency, where it is actually valuable?

[Piaras Kelly]

Hand on heart, I'd say you could take 'big' and replace that with 'all' to be honest John. Just like I said in your post 'will the last tech journo turn off the lights' I think it's a problem that you're going to be facing more often these days.

What's really interesting about this post is that you can see bloggers making the same points. What it really comes down to is PR people not knowing the journalist. I'm still fresh faced so I know I can improve. One of my goals for the year is to meet face-to-face with a lot more journalists, so expect an email about lunch soon :D

Interesting to hear that you went from PR to journalism, that's a story I'd like to hear.

[John Collins]

damien - to be fair to them, as far as i know, the number of journalists using rss feeds in this country is fairly limited so can't expect them to be set up for that just yet. would make my job a hell of lot easier.

paul - don't get me wrong, i don't object to receiving calls from pr people. but when it's merely to ask if i had received a press release that's a waste of both our time. i have received calls from a furniture store using technology which seems similar to yours (may even be one of your clients). what i like about that is that they ring straight through to the message service of my mobile rather than interupting me. to be honest i would not be keen to see pr companies start using notification tools like yours for communicating with journalists. i can guarantee i would start getting an automated call every time a press release went out, which would mean i would probably go postal.

piaras - knowing the journo is definitely important, especially in a specialist field like tech. i think i'm a pretty approachable guy but i'm also self employed and need to get a certain amount of copy written each day. getting your office junior to ring me as part of a mass ring around is not likely to endear me to your agency or clients. the last staff job i had i'd say i lost about an hour a week minimum handling irrelevant calls like that.

[Damien Mulley]

John,
Got any suggestions on how to introduce aggregators and as a result blogs to other journos?

[John Collins]

damien - with karlin lillington, adrian weckler and myself all blogging fairly regularly that's got to help. i've certainly made contacts and found stories as a result of my blogging. as far as aggregators are concerned it's going to be a chicken and an egg situation. there needs to be useful services for irish journos before they will make the move but will the services be offered by prs etc. if journos don't use the tool. i find some of the govt dept feeds quite useful for monitoring relevant events.

[Tom Murphy]

Dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Yes this is appalling. I was once (many years ago) the fresh faced youth forced to follow up press releases (fax and post, we had Dos-based e-mail but no one else did) with journalists. However, you quickly learnt that it wasn't terribly productive.

In fairness to the poor callow youth (my assumption) I imagine his manager forced him to call everyone on the list so they can put it as an activity in the monthly report. But then again, at least when I was forced to do it, we were also told to offer something additional.

RSS will definetely grow in usage but it'll never completely replace e-mail, and it's still some time before it becomes a mainstay in Ireland.

John you should develop a narky side and bark at the next one who does it. Maybe I'll give it a test run :-)

TM

[Eoin]

This is always a thorny one. The robotic calling a journalist to see if they received the release is a waste of time and a lot of people push it onto the last person in the door to do it, which is also a mistake.
However following up on story, if you have something extra to add (hidden angle, info that is not in the release, possible feature idea, area that the journalist is particularly interested in etc) can be appreciated and a good service to clients.
The bigger problem is information overload and I have experienced it that some national journalists dont look at their e-mail unless prompted. They now receive some much mail (a lot of it junk) that they simply dont read a huge amount of it or only look at ones where they recognise the source. Some have even suggested faxing it also which is a real backward step.
Eoin