Sayonara, Florida

In two hours, I will be leaving Florida and making my way to the nation’s capital to begin the next stage of my life. Although I rarely write about my personal life on this blog, there’s a lot going on in my head that I feel like sharing.

College is over. It’s a surreal feeling– one that hasn’t quite hit me yet, and probably won’t until August when I see most of my friends buckling down for a new semester.

I’m leaving my family and friends and wondering how I’m going to afford life in a big city. First of all, everything is a lot more expensive than I think it should be. For example, bath mats at Target are $12.99 and up. Seriously? 13 bucks for a bath mat? In my head, those things should be 3 dollars. Or free, that would work, too.

But, I digress…

A lot of changes are taking place, and I don’t want to take a tone that’s too self-pitying because I know I am just one in a million recent college grads taking a chance and starting over, but it’s a difficult time for me. I’m a homebody who truly puts family and friends first, and leaving them all behind is challenging.

Once I get to D.C., I know I’ll be happy, but that 11 hour car ride is going to be rough, and not just because I have to share the backseat with my two younger brothers. It’s going to give me ample time to reflect on the first 22 years of my life and wonder what the next 22 will bring. Because that’s what I do–I over analyze.

When it comes down to it, I’m ecstatic to finally be moving to a big city where I can rely on public transportation and have a wealth of culture and history at my disposal. I plan to take full advantage of my time there, embracing every opportunity that comes my way, but that doesn’t mean I won’t look back on my time at USF.

So, as I get ready to place the last box in my family truck, I’m hanging on to the memories and looking forward to chasing my dreams.

Real world, here I come.

A Young Pro’s Take: Media Relations and the New PR Blacklists

As a new—brand new!—PR professional, this tug-of-war between public relations practitioners and the media is exhausting. For those of you who don’t know about this already, another public outing of PR agencies that apparently spam bloggers and journalists has been created. Coming only a couple of months after Chris Anderson’s infamous blacklist, this shows that PR pros haven’t learned their lesson yet. But what exactly is the lesson that needs to be learned when it comes to media relations?

After reading the slew of posts covering this topic that popped up on the blogosphere yesterday, I think I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of core issues:

• That’s not how I want to be contacted. These PR pros pitched the blogger at her personal e-mail address, when she clearly said this is not how she wanted to be contacted. This should be the first step in media relations—if you are trying to build a relationship with someone, you should respect their requests. All relationships are built on trust and respect, right?

**UPDATE: In this particular instance, Cision listed the blogger’s personal e-mail address as her main form of contact. Clearly a mistake on this company’s part, which might account for the heavy influx of pitches sent to this address. I’m interested to see how Cision handles this specific case. I am not making excuses as I still think it’s important for PR pros to monitor their media lists, making sure that they are up-to-date and correct.

• 587 new e-mails…Bah humbug. Bulk pitching is, apparently, the devil. Bulk pitching equals laziness. It shows that the PR professional didn’t take the time to read the journalist’s past work, comment or engage in the material, and decided to send out mass pitch e-mails instead. Brian Solis’ post broke down e-mail pitches into three categories: spam, bacn, and tofu. The varying levels of processed (eh, or fake) meat depend on the level of connection the pitcher made with the journalist. I won’t go into too much detail because I really want you to click on the link and read the post for yourself—the post and the comments make for an interesting read. The point is that you have to know who you are pitching. Todd Defren at Shift Communications posted a terrific guideline to blogger relations and how to build these relationships before you pitch. He makes his employees laminate it and stick it on their desks—I’ll be doing it, too.
• But I write about technology, not pet care. Another problem is that the journalist never writes about what we are pitching. This is the issue I have the most difficulty understanding, because it seems like common sense that you would only pitch those writers who have an interest in your client or product. I find it hard to believe that every agency listed on that wiki pitched an unrelated topic, which makes me wonder how broad is too broad? If you cover technology, and my client is releasing a new product related to Web development, shouldn’t I pitch you? Maybe I’m over thinking the whole process, but this is where my knowledge of media relations grows thin. How can I ensure that my message is wanted without being a mind reader?
• What do you expect? I don’t know what I’m doing! Jeremy Pepper thinks the main issue is that PR pros aren’t being properly trained when it comes to media relations. While I can’t speak from the professional side, I can agree with him from the academic side. As a recent grad, I can tell you that I have had minimal exposure to pitching the media. This is, obviously, very difficult to do in the classroom setting, and most of my internships would let me pitch only when everyone else was swamped with bigger clients. For many of my peers, pitching is the thing we know the least about after graduation, which means it’s the area we need the most training in when we enter the workforce. What do we need to know? How do bloggers and journalists want to be pitched? Better yet, professionals, what are your media relations training programs like in this PR 2.0 world?

Back when I was a baby blogger, I wrote about this topic. I asked how to be better, and I got very few responses. So here I am, a PR professional, asking (again) what I can do to help make the relationship between PR and the media more beneficial for both sides. What’s the lesson that needs to be learned?

Because, personally, I want to stop this tug-o-war. My hands are getting blisters.