Zombie Publicity

For some reason, many people love to call themselves publicists. I am not sure why. I think some people just associate the idea of doing public relations with being affiliated with the few who are cool or successful or with industries that are interesting. They think it's work that has mostly perks (say, freebies) and no slog (wrong!)

Sadly, many people who work in PR or communications or whatever you want to call it are really not pros at it. Many journalists have gone into PR as Plan C (with Plan A being an editor, author, playwright or screenwriter and Plan B just writing for a newspaper or magazine until retirement). I can't begin to tell you how many "publicists" I know who are really just self-promoters and have rather tenuous connections to the people or businesses they're supposed to be representing. Of course, there are those who work hard at PR and manage to keep up with the current trends and the musical chairs in media. (The latter is key. If you don't have a good contact at the newspaper or magazine that serves the readers who benefit from your client, it is exceedingly hard even just to get a calendar listing, let alone "ink" about him.

As I've been working on the holiday calendar for my newspaper, I have been dealing with a lot of inexperienced publicists and communications directors. If you're one of them, I'm not holding it against you. However, please don't do zombie publicity. Keep these tips in mind for the future:

1. Please understand that I'm busy. I don't have time to send out a myriad of individual emails and to call each person. I do the best I can.
2. If I call and you're not there, please return my call within a reasonable amount of time. If you put me on the back burner, chances are your organization will not get ink.
3. Look at your email before you automatically hit the delete button. Just because the subject line promises "Free Calendar Listing," you should not consider it junk mail.
4. When I ask for a document from which I can cut and paste information, please don't send me links to your website or a PDF document. It's hard to go back and forth from the Web to Word and skip the pictures. Ditto for the PDF.
   
5. Don't go overboard on your descriptions. Look at a newspaper. Note that they no longer publish 300 and 400 word press releases. Two paragraphs and you're done. Realize that many people read their email on smart phones that have small screens. Thus, everything in your press release is really just an announcement, and everything in it must be pertinent, and everything pertinent must be in it.
6. About your style: please use AP style whenever possible. Periods instead of dashes in telephone numbers may look nice, but we use hyphens. Don't make us correct your style.
7. Use Spell Check. I can't take you seriously if you send me something with typos.
   
8. And double check your calendar to make sure you have the correct date(s).
9. Call me (or your contact) at a newspaper or magazine and make sure that your email address is "whitelisted." Otherwise, we may never get your email because the company's IT security system might consider it spam. (Hint: Constant Contact doesn't work for that reason; it's considered a bulk mailer.)
   
10. Have your webmaster update your website. Sometimes I work off-hours. I can't and won't include information from last year. Don't just do this for my sake. Do it for the insomniacs who go onto websites at 3:00 a.m. because they are looking for information.

Thank you.