The Pitch That Worked

I tweeted the other day that I got a really great pitch via email, and dozens of folks immediately wanted me to share it. But I won’t, partly because I don’t have permission, but mostly because it shouldn’t matter.

Writing a decent email pitch isn’t complicated. And I know some folks are looking for the Almighty Template (to you, I say sternly and a bit impatiently: quit looking for shortcuts and learn for yourself). But here’s my assessment of why this pitch worked, and a bit of a tricky bit at the end that is really the linchpin of the whole thing.

Concise

We all get tons of email. No one – I repeat, no one – wants to wade through a tome of paragraphs and prose. Send a nice intro, a quick summary, a few key details, and let the recipient ask for more information if they’re interested in it. If I’m interested, I WILL ask for more info. If I’m not, all the words in the world aren’t going to convince me otherwise.

Personal

Don’t you dare try to say “I love your blog” if you’ve read the last three posts and are attempting to feign interest. I don’t care if you love or even read my blog, and that’s not important to me if your pitch is good. What’s more important is that you’re friendly, personable, and interested in me and what I do, and the audience and community I serve. We’re all people here, and while we have jobs to do, it matters to me that we can talk to each other like humans and not “bloggers” and “PR people”.

Focused

Know exactly what you’re asking me to pay attention to, and point to it directly. In this case, it was a project, and it came with a quick summary of the purpose of the project and a link. Are you asking me to cover it on my blog? Tweet about it? Take some action of some kind? (This one actually will require a pretty significant commitment on my part if I do it). Be precise, and tell me exactly what you’re asking me to commit to so I can put it straight on my to-do list if I’m interested. Open ended means that I have to stash it to think about later, and even with the best intentions, that can sometimes mean it gets forgotten.

Relevant

And that means relevant to me not you. A little research can tell someone that I’m in the social media space as a community director for a software company, I have a daughter, I travel a lot, stuff like that. Any of those three categories is at least a starting place to see if your stuff lines up with my universe. And while I know you can’t read my mind, at least let me know what dots you connected, as in “I know you’re a mom, and we’re hoping that you might find something like this fun to do with your kids.” And hey, this is shocking, but if you’re in doubt about a fit, why not ask before you pitch?

Sticky Part: Interesting Project

This is what it ALL boils down to, guys. All the PR polish, best practices, and well-written pitches in the world will not do a damned thing if your project, product, or idea isn’t interesting. And that means interesting to other people. It’s really easy to convince ourselves that something is big news to US because we’re close to it, instead of looking at the news with some perspective.

I know it’s hard. I know you get saddled with crap from your clients that isn’t remotely newsworthy, yet you’re commanded to go out there and tell people about it anyway. Your job is to either find a way to make it interesting, or be brave enough to push back on your client and tell them why it isn’t. You’re paid to be an adviser and protector of the relationships you have with your media contacts, not just a lackey that follows direction blindly.

That also means that if “interesting” is relevant to just a small, niche group – like, say, buyers of specialized medical equipment – then guess what? That’s who you pitch. Even if there’s only 10 of them. And again, you have to teach your clients that no, Gary Vee is not likely to do a video about it, and that they should be fishing in the proper pond, no matter if it’s large or small. Volume doesn’t equal impact. If they’re not listening, or if you don’t understand that, maybe neither of you are ready to be doing this kind of outreach.

The Unteachables

All of these things require a bit of judgment and finesse, which isn’t really teachable, unfortunately. It’s about saying to yourself “If I were the blogger here, outside of my bias, would this get my attention and why?” Being honest with yourself about that as a HUMAN instead of just the media relations pro can help an awful lot.

And I teeter on the fence all the time about whether you can teach people and relationship skills. Can you teach someone to pen an email that’s friendly yet professional? I don’t know. I feel like many of the people I know that do it best just, well, do it. It’s just wired into the way they work. I know personally I never got “coached” about how to send an email to a donor prospect. I just knew what felt like the right tone and approach.

I believe you can teach nuance, style, all that mechanical stuff. But can you really teach intent? I’m not sure.

So Then.

Have I told you all the stuff you already know? And if so, why are so many folks still struggling with this? Or is this all revolutionary and new and not obvious? I’m really eager to understand the Quest for the Perfect Pitch and why it seems to go wrong so often. Big discussion I know, but what the heck.

Sound off.

image credit: JonathanRossi

It’s Hip to Be Contrarian

Tell me how many times you’ve seen one of these statements:

• Social media needs less talk and more action.
• We need better case studies.
• Businesses (or People) need to be more human.
• We need less pundits and more practical examples.
• We need to do more good with the tools we have.
  
• It’s about the HOW today, not the WHY.
• Social media folks need to do more and talk less.
  

It’s the emerging contrarian pushback to the oh-so-fluffy days of social media punditry, “evangelism” and kumbaya, and I get it.

Sort of.

Yes, we’ve come beyond the “oooooh pretty” phase of social media. Maybe there are lots of folks who are still doing it wrong. And some of us are determined to show just how much more “serious” we are about it than the next guy, so we’re pushing back on all the people who aren’t living up to our social media activist ideals.

But here’s the thing.

When I ask you what you mean by “better case studies”, you’d better be able to tell me exactly what constitutes a good one, or a bad one, and how you’d recommend others improve theirs. Otherwise, you’ve no room to criticize.

If you’re asking for a person or business to be more human, you’d better be able to illustrate an example of what a “human” presence looks like, and explain why it works better than the alternative, in terms that acknowledge your personal tastes and biases for how you use social networks. (Remember this is all opt-in. Choose your path, and shape your own experience.)

A lot of the talk (read: content) that’s out there is people doing their best to work through ideas, settle into and participate in their communities in their own way, figure out what works and what doesn’t, provide examples of what they’re doing and teach or share.

So while I agree that we need to continue to do as much as we talk, I also think we need to lighten up a bit.

Punditry has it’s place. I learn a lot from thinking, pontificating, looking at ideas from different lenses.  Talking things through. Doing my own thinking around someone else’s ideas. It’s how I shape perspectives and approach, and always keep a fresh eye on ways to look at things that are outside my practical, hands-on experience. But that’s me.

So here’s my challenge: if you want to demand that more people lead social media excellence by demonstration, be prepared to articulate what constitutes your good examples, devoid of jargon of your own in order to rail against the jargon you don’t like. Instead, I’m asking you (us) to:

• Be specific about what you want to see happen, in clear and simple terms.
• Explain why you think that outcome is better than the alternative(s) and what it achieves.
• Consider your own biases, even if you don’t verbalize them.
• Break down your generalizations (“everyone”, “always”) into focused characteristics of what you think works and doesn’t work, in a specific context.
• Illustrate the alternative actions and behaviors you want to see.

Otherwise? We’re just empty critics that can’t offer constructive solutions or ideas. Which means we’ve contributed exactly zero toward creating the change we so demand. And we’ve become the actionless talkers that we’re so mightily raging against.

Great examples of challengers that provide substance to their arguments? Geoff Livingston. Justin Kownacki. Chris Penn. Lisa Barone. See how they write about what’s not working for them, but clearly talk about what they’d like to see instead and why?

Perhaps it’s just part of the lifecycle of new things we’re exploring: we love it, then we resist and criticize it, maybe even hate it, then we settle for temperance somewhere in the middle.

But I think we can do a better job of backing up our objections with some articulate thoughts that light the path forward. And I hope you’ll keep me held to that standard, too.

What do you say?

image by OakleyOriginals

The Silence Between The Notes

As a musician, you’re taught and reminded often how important the rests are in the music.

The silence between the notes is every bit as important as the sound itself.

We talk a lot these days.

And when you find yourself overwhelmed,

Wondering what to say next,

It might be a good time to just sit back and listen for a while.

Wanna Write? Read Voraciously.

A writing habit is cultivated by two things:

1. Writing a lot.
2. Reading even more.

The more you write, the more you get to practice flexing vocabulary and voice as well as how to put your ideas into clear thoughts. The more you read, the more you capture lessons about tone, sentence structure, cadence, and idea flow.  And the more you do both, the more everything you touch, see, hear, and read becomes the seed of something else to write about.

There are some great posts out there about cultivating a writing habit, like these:

• Cultivate a Writing Habit: Chris Brogan
• 10 Steps to Create the Habit of Writing: Write to Done
• Seven Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School: Copyblogger
• Posts on Better Writing: Men with Pens
• Complete Your First Book with These 9 Simple Writing Habits: Dumb Little Man

These practices apply whether you’re blogging or penning a novel. Writing is an active discipline. You have to do it. Often.

But absorbing the written word in lots of different forms makes you a better writer. Period. Read blogs, articles, business books, biographies, fiction, whatever suits your fancy right now.

Not sure what to read? I piled a bunch of recommendations for books in my Twitter favorites. Scroll through them and you’ll find lots that have been tossed to me by my Twitter friends.  And I keep an Evernote file called “Book List” where I capture all the titles I haven’t read, but want to, so I’m always prepared at the bookstore or the library.

Reading more helps you identify good writing AND bad writing, and how to tell the difference between the two. You’ll start learning to spot words that are smooth to read versus overly dense, the pace of delivering ideas and organizing them in a flow, length of sentences that are easy or hard to read, vocabulary that’s too high brow or not nuanced enough.

Julien Smith tells you how to read a book a week in 2010. I probably average that if not more, in addition to all the blogs I read and online articles, news, whitepapers, etc. I read a ton, and I write every day. If you hate to read, that’s going to be harder for you, but it’s important nonetheless.

If delivering content on the web in written form is something you seriously aspire to – for the sake of contribution of ideas or to make money or both – you’ d better learn what it takes to write well, and reading is an important step to doing just that.

There is no shortcut.

Are you a writer? Reader? Both? Do you agree? What are you reading right now?

image by moriza

Altitude’s Top 10 in 2009

You made this blog a fun, engaging and interesting place to be this year. Lots of comments, lots of discussion, lots to think about.

It’s a fascinating exercise to see what resonated most with you over the last twelve months. Interestingly, it seems like the practical, how-to stuff like time management and measurement was important overall, but lots and lots of you were interested in social media jobs, especially the nitty-gritty of community roles like mine.

I’ll be keeping all of that in mind as I embark on some expanded work in 2010. And if you’d like to stay along for the ride, please consider subscribing via email or RSS and come back often.

So, if you missed a couple, here are the posts you visited the most this year. Thanks for making this blog thing such a worthwhile and thought-provoking endeavor.

10. Productivity and Time Wasters in Social Media – A look at some of the top time sucks in social media, and the tasks that can actually move your work forward.

9. Social Media Time Management: 9 Guiding Principles – Some tips for managing information overload and tasks related to your online work.

8. Hiring for Social Media: Good Moves – The upside of some of the new roles and job opportunities emerging in social media.

7. Five Myths of Community Management – More on the community theme, this time debunking a few of the myths typically associated with these roles.

6. The Ultimate Community Management FAQ – More questions and answers about the role of community managers, from my experience and perspective.

5. The Social Media Team E-Book - A collection of some other posts on building a social media team, across departments and disciplines, including a case study from Humana.

4. Hiring for Social Media: What I’d Look For – Another post in the group of social media jobs series, with my thoughts on what kind of skills and attributes are necessary for these roles.

3. There Is No Social Media Kit – Why there’s no perfect set of shortcuts for social media, and some foundational questions to consider when building your strategy.

2. Hiring For Social Media: The Ugly Side – Some of the less-promising trends in social media job descriptions and recruiting.

1. Being a Director of Community - A look at a job like mine, as it looked back in March. Stay tuned for the “one year later” look in a couple of months.

Thanks again for reading and being part of what keeps me writing and noodling and thinking. I’m really glad you’re here.