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Last week we started talking about PR pitches: the good, the bad, and the inane. We continue along that thread this week with some interesting examples that have crossed our virtual desks, including:

• Be authentic, especially when it comes to what you say in your subject line. There is this post on Medium about a personalized email message that has an unsubscribe link at the bottom: choose one way or the other, but don’t try to represent your missive as both. Worse yet, is having a subject line that says Don’t open this email as a come-on. This just annoys us and is counter-productive.
• Priceless is not a marketing strategy. We get many press releases without any mention of price, and when we go online, nothing is there about pricing either. David wrote a blog post about this a while back that is worth reviewing. Better yet, put a special “Pricing” link at the top of your home page so that everyone can easily find it. Your customers, and potential customers, will thank you.
• Call out surprising results up top, especially about survey results. So often we get press releases with abundantly obviously information, such as “80% of enterprises are moving to the cloud.” Yeah, we’ve heard that one before.
• We are not called targets, and you are not called flacks. We are both people, and we need each other too.
• No response to your email IS a response. Too often we get anxious messages from PR folks that ask if we got the first email and did we need anything further. The answer is no. If we need something, you will be the first to know.
• Watch your spelling and grammar and other obvious editing errors. They all matter.
• Take a moment to ask for help if you are new. But do it in a way that is respectful of our time. A colleague of ours got this email from a novice PR person: Based on your work reporting tech and tech business, what makes a great story, in your view? I ask because I’m with an IoT startup in [some city], and we’d love to be able to provide interesting stories from time to time. It would be great to know what kind of content would be really valuable to you. Then, if you were open to the idea, we would only raise possible stories we were sure you’d love.  Please take the time to do this, it will get great results.

About David Strom

David Strom is a former editor-in-chief of Network Computing and Tom's Hardware who has written two computer networking books and thousands of articles about B2B IT.

About Paul Gillin

Paul Gillin, host of FIR B2B, is a veteran technology journalist and a thought leader in new media. Since 2005, he has advised marketers and business executives on strategies to optimize their use of social media and online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively. Full bio