10 March 2010

PR tip 2: Don't bargain with me

The arrangement is quite simple. I'm proposing to review your hotel in a guide book, or to write a feature about your destination. You, confident in the desirable qualities of what you're offering, and seeking to have those qualities more widely known, are going to give me access to it/experience of it, so that I can write about it in a well-informed way.

I, for my part, guarantee you nothing at all.

I'm hoping that what you've got to offer is going to be worth writing about. I'm fairly confident that you've got something of interest or I wouldn't be spending time on it. Indeed, I'm only going to accept your offer if it I already have a commission of some kind in which your product/service/destination looks very likely to feature.

But sometimes what you have turns out to be poor, or not what you promised it would be. Sometimes it turns out it doesn't fit in the story. Sometimes it's in the story, but the editor demands a different angle. Sometime's it's in the original story, but someone else cuts it. There's a lot that's beyond my control. I promise not to waste your time and resources intentionally, but sometimes thing just go wrong. Publications vanish, or control of their contents switches, or their policies change, or their editors leave, in between commission and publication. You lose out, and I lose out. That, unfortunately, is the way of the publishing world.

Unless an editor has already given me a deadline, or unless I myself have control over publication date, I won't even say what that date is going to be. And it's not unheard of for me to rush to meet an editor-imposed short notice deadline only to see the piece finally appear over a year later.

Let's be entirely clear: The purpose of my piece is NOT to promote your business. The purpose is to give an engaging account with good advice for the reader, in which it is intended your business/destination will appear. Editors, and indeed readers, can smell a plug a mile off, and I'm not going to embarrass myself in front of any of them by pushing something that doesn't fit in the story, or using any form of words except my own, or any opinions except those I've come up with by myself.

So don't say to me, 'We'll give you a third free night as long as you guarantee to mention our new spa.' Don't say, 'We'll upgrade you on our airline as long as you guarantee to write a piece on our lie-flat beds in business class.' I'm not for sale, and although I have some sympathy for the pressures under which you find yourself, the effect will be entirely the opposite of the one you want to achieve.
submit to reddit
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)