At present, the practice of PR is full of mistaken ideas. Let’s spot a few together…
The first is thinking that email is an essential medium through which you can place stories without doing any more work than drafting a press release, titling your email “Press release”, writing “Please find the attached press release” and titling the attached press release as (what else?) “pressrelease.doc”.
Yeah, you’re laughing, aren’t you? I get a couple of those a month though, a statistic that has remained unchanged for at least ten years.
The second is thinking that “a follow-up call” will magically make me interested in what you wrote. Yes, I know that it’s the client who wants you to make that call so you can put a little mark in the column next to my name, show them you sent the press release and then followed it up.
You know what? I don’t want to be your client’s kibble. Every journalist I know *hates* those calls. Every PR person I know hates making them. Feel free to print this out and “accidentally” leave it on your client’s desk. Just because they’re checkbox-obsessed doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be. Your time and mine would be better spent considering one of the points below.