How PR Firms are Still Doing It Wrong

Sometimes a rant is longer than a tweet and doesn’t quite seem right for a Facebook post. So here I am.

This morning I got an email from a PR firm telling me that their client made a video that might interest me and would be of interest to my readers. Keep in mind that I am a blogger who is listed in a major PR contact database so I get lots of emails of this type. Most do not pay attention to the fact that I blog about social media, and forget about them understanding that I focus on social media for B2B companies, but that’s a rant for another day. Oh wait, I already wrote that one about non-targeted PR over a year ago.

The text of this email has to be so compelling that it can overcome the fact that it doesn’t even contain a link to the video. That is pretty unlikely. I have to download a word doc to find the video link. And even there, it is buried as an afterthought at the end of the release. It even comes after the boilerplate, or company about statement.

And the worse thing about this is that this is a video that I am interested in because it is actually targeted and relevant to me and my readers. I want to see it and the PR person has made it so hard to even find a link to it. This is called too much friction. When you put too much friction between your audience and an action, they don’t take that action.

Bloggers don’t want to read press releases. They don’t want to download attachments. If you have something to say, put it in the email. If you have something to share, put it in the email. You are not driving page views here. You need to make this easy, not hard.