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PR Fuel: Media List MadnessA word of advice: Remove Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson from your email list.Anderson kicked up a storm last week on his blog (http://tinyurl.com/ysk996) when he announced that he was banning public relations people from his email inbox. "I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam, it's PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching," Anderson wrote. "So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that's why my email address is public)," Anderson continued. "Everything else gets banned on first abuse." Anderson went on to provide his readers with a list of dozens of email addresses that he has banned. Among the banned are representatives from Edelman, 5WPR, WNET New York (the local PBS channel), Cisco Systems, Weber Shandwick and Sony. The comments section on Anderson's post then exploded. Some people cheered him on, others said he acted immaturely by posting the email addresses (which can easily be harvested by spambots). The moral of the story is a simple one: Keep your media lists updated and targeted. The question is, how do you go about it? 1. Target Journalists With Press Releases: Press release services such as eReleases.com (the publisher of this newsletter) don't just distribute press releases, they target journalists who have signed up to receive content related to specific topics. This is the easiest way to reach the right journalists because they've actually opted in to receive your release.A few years ago, my company sprang for option #2, the media database. It was not cheap, but it served as a nice way for us to build an initial media list. We only used the product for a year and since then, we've maintained the list manually. We also use targeted press release distribution to ensure that our press releases are getting into the hands of journalists who actually want them. A combination of options #1 and #3 is what I suggest for anyone on a budget. An updated media list is important and Anderson proves why. You don't want to alienate or annoy journalists by bombarding them with untargeted press releases or communications. More important, you want to ensure that your message is getting through to the people that matter. An outdated and untargeted media list is not going to bring you the same returns that a properly maintained media list brings. As for Anderson, he should make sure his own PR firm heeds his advice. When I was a journalist, I received plenty of untargeted email pitches from the firm that represented Wired. (Anyone who read my column back then would have realized that I covered breaking news with an emphasis on the telecommunications industry and Wall Street - not technology or magazine publishers.) I never complained; I just deleted the emails. (For the record: I did bite on one pitch from Wired's PR firm, but that's only because my editor made me.) Anderson should also push his peers in the media to make it easier for public relations people and others to contact journalists. Many media websites do not provide easily accessible contact information for their journalists. If the information is there, readers are often in the dark about exactly what beat the journalist covers, and it's not always obvious who covers what. For example, I always ended up on technology media lists even though I covered business. Yes, I wrote about tech companies, but purely from a financial angle. I rarely wrote about the actual technology. The last few weeks of the year are often the slowest for PR people. This is the perfect time for you to update your media list and ensure that it's targeted properly.
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