Dear PR Flack,

How ironic that your boss’s most recent blog entry focuses on crafting better pitches. Too bad you didn’t follow his advice!

Here are a few tips you might have missed:

1. Cameron is not our blog’s main writer — he posts about every 3 months, whereas I write multiple times a week — so I am not sure why you are addressing your pitch to him.

2. We write about real food on our blog, so Sandra Lee’s new book is not going to be of interest to our readers.

3. We partner with Amazon AStore, so I can’t imagine why you’d think we’d be interested in sending our readers to [your client's competing site].

If you can’t be troubled to do even the most basic research, we can’t be troubled to read your pitches. Please remove us from your firm’s contact list immediately.

xoxo,
- Anita (and Cameron)

Dear PR Flack:

1) I’m not sure you sent this “Dear editor” email to the right place: I’m not an editor, and I do have a name. It’s pretty easy to find, too, at the top of every post.

2) When you say “I am following up on a pitch letter I sent you a few days ago”, you might want to check that you actually did pitch me before. You didn’t. And thank god for that.

3) Do you see any recipes on our site that call for crappy HFCS- and transfat-riddled candy bars? No? Oh, see, that’s because we write about real food. So why the hell did you send me this pitch?

4) I’m looking at your firm’s Code of Ethics. Does spam-pitching fall under “acting as responsible advocates for those we represent”?

5) If you can’t be bothered to do the most basic research, I have no interest in hearing about your clients’ news. Please remove me from your contact list.

xoxo,
- Anita

Dear PR Flack:

If I may quote your CEO’s blog entry from August 22nd of this year: “In essence, there are many ways one can utilize social media today to become a better PR pro.”

One of those ways is NOT mass-emailing bloggers. Just as you wouldn’t send out a blanket pitch to a randomly generated media list, similar rules apply for social media (especially in the tight-knit food blog world). We expect that PR pros will take a few seconds to weed out inappropriate blogs on a list, learn what the remaining blogs’ foci are, and then customize and target the most relevant pitches and messages accordingly.

After all, if your CEO publicly called out an account rep at [a competing agency] for pitching him and his blog on a service they were representing (which he pointed out, and I agree, was a clear lack of targeting or research on [the other guy]’s part), why would [your agency's] employee commit a similar foul?

One last thing: I think you meant to quote Bobby Flay as saying, “I bathe in it.” Not, “I bath in it.”

xoxo,
- Carol

Dear PR Flack: 

Our cocktail-focused blog — with authors in New York,
LA, SF, and Wisconsin — doesn’t need to know what kind of wood
tables your client’s Chicago restaurant has.

xoxo,
- The Cocktailians

Dear PR Flack:

Given that the tagline of our blog is “The Continuing Adventures of a Couple of San Francisco Food Dorks”, what made you think we’d be interested in how The Lower East Side celebrates New York City Apple Day?

And, by the by, there’s no such thing as a “first annual” anything. The word you’re grasping for is “inaugural”.

xoxo,
- Anita

Dear PR Flack:

Does my blog photo make me look like a co-ed who plays a lot of field hockey? Because I’m truly puzzled as to what else might have convinced you I’d promote your bizarre sports drink/college voter drive.

xoxo,
- Anita

Dear PR Flack:

No, the readers of our local/sustainable food blog don’t want to enter the Merry Meatballs Holiday Recipe Contest featuring your client’s product — an alluring melange of feedlot meat and lab chemicals, mmm!

xoxo,
- Anita

Dear PR Flack:

Notice how I used “Dear” in my salutation, as opposed to “Hey”? That’s how professionals do it.

And, my name is Carol, not French Laundry at Home. You would have known that, had you taken 16 seconds to actually check out my blog before sending this email. You also would have learned that my blog is all about cooking every dish in The French Laundry Cookbook and writing about it.

In addition to the bad targeting and your obvious, and quite strange, love for ALL CAPS and exclamation points, your email is chock full of grammatical errors, run-on sentences, typos, and nothing newsworthy whatsoever, which makes me question your credibility as a public relations professional.

xoxo,
- Carol

Dear PR Flack:

Even if I were planning an Oktoberfest bash, I’d sooner serve tofu-pups to my carnivorous friends than your client’s CAFO torture snausage. Because nothing says “party” like industrial pork, no sirree.

xoxo,
- Anita

Dear PR Flack:

You think I’m the perfect choice to cook my way through the Anheuser-Busch cookbook and blog about it? Are you kidding me?

xoxo,
- Carol