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I’ve been working at a PR agency for two short months now and in that time I have learned a lot about the different things that go on here.
As a recent college graduate aspiring to pursue Public Relations as a career and not having much experience about the field at all, it only made sense to try and land an internship at a PR agency. In only two short months I have learned how to do a lot of tasks required of someone in the PR world, from mastering media lists to creating briefing documents to clipping and tracking coverage. Most of the tasks assigned to me I had a general understanding of how they come to be and are created, until recently when I was asked to help out with both creating pitch abstracts and sending out different pitches. Uh-oh.
1. Scout/Tailor: do your research, what are their interests what do they like writing about and what have they previously written about?
Make sure whatever you are pitching them falls somewhat in the spectrum of their interests. For instance it wouldn’t make sense to pitch an idea about a new beauty products to a reporter who writes about Politics. Unless this new product has a way of giving Donald Trump more volume in his hair, I highly doubt the reporter will give the idea the time of day. Sure this may be obvious to most people but the important thing to remember when one has the urge to send out this pitch to every contact they have in their system is that:
1. It’s a waste of time. Don’t exhaust your time and energy sending a pitch out to people who will open it and find the nearest trash can on their screen to dump it in.
2. It may hinder your relationship with a reporter. If you are constantly spamming a writer or reporter (especially with topics they don’t care about) your once pretty good relationship with them may go sour and prevent working together in the future.
-Proof, proof & proof again
-Headlines are the face of your pitch: entertaining? Refreshing & new, not too fluffy not too plain, no bias
-“Don’t pitch your company”
-Who cares?/ “I always feel like somebody’s watching me”
-Patience young grass hopper
-You win some you lose some
-R-E-S-P-E-C-T