Bulldog Reporter
Richard Laermer

Just when I thought we’d seen it all at the Bad Pitch Blog, this new hullabaloo comes from somewhere seriously unexpected—one of my clients.

Kevin Dugan of Strategic PR and I focus on “outing” the worst media relations practitioners at the Bad Pitch Blog every day. But an awful attempt to steal a client from me warranted a slightly off-topic post.

A biz dev lady at a competing firm liked my client enough to ask for his business. Uncannily, she got a response back (cc’d to me) whereby the smart dude paying my firm for PR told her the letter was about the worst he’d ever seen—implying it was generic, poorly written, devoid of ideas and particularly trite, without research nor back-up. Talk about busted.

This was not what surprised me, but rather how she embarrassed both of us and our mutual profession with the ham-fisted way she tried to do me in. Here’s the big question: Why is everything a form letter these days? Whether it’s lazy emails to reporters or vapid communication to colleagues or CYA communication to clients (”Sounds good! I’m with you!”) or the letters we send to prospects, it’s as if we’re playing a game of numbers instead of putting thought onto paper and monitor.

Are we so busy that we simply want to “git ‘er done” instead of putting in the real mental energy? Has approach and grammar become so damn unimportant in these fast-paced, vowel-dropping, texted-to-death times of ours?

These were questions I posed in the Bad Pitch Blog—and the responses were shockers.

I was surprised some of the same readers that support Kevin and me in singling out bad PR pitches weren’t happy about my overly-chatty claim. They thought I was being mean or perhaps unethical when, in fact, like your mother told you, medicine sometimes cures what ails you.

See, the latest example of PR running amok tells me we are plainly letting technology override how we target the communications we send out: with our heads and not our hands.

I see it every day in my own company. It used to be one-to-one combat—no matter what. But now there’s so much competition to get “a hit” that I see folks blindly sending to lists no matter how much I threaten extinction for such practices. Why do we exist, anyway? Isn’t everything we do about so-called relations, not just putting (it) out? Do we really want the kind of relationship forged or continued with a form letter!

My client was well-intended in sending me a copy of his retort to the poorly-constructed pitch for his biz. The BD person in question swore she didn’t know my client has representation. Alas, if she looked up the CEO’s email on his site, she could have just as easily clicked on “Press Contact” and figured this out. That’s what got me started.

But in truth, it bugs me that a non-PR entity saw the form lettering being filed by my … peers (I left the quotes out). This guy’s a CEO-for-life type, and he’s going to think twice before letting “PR guys” at his boardroom table in the future.

Okay, fine, it’s only one blog post on one blog and this is a matter of opinion. But with the ‘net making journalists out of everyone, isn’t the wave we should be riding one of better communiqués rather than swiftly-devised crap we wouldn’t read if it landed in our inbox?

More than ever, spam filters win this war anyway. We need to try less to beat the filters and harder to get through to people with our words—and anyway, isn’t the idea to put more thought into messages, regardless of medium, topic or target?

Richard Laermer is CEO of RLM PR and co-manager of the Bad Pitch Blog. He is also the author of “Punk Marketing” and “Full Frontal PR.”