Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

As the owner of a couple of mildly popular blogs (not this one,obviously) I, like many others, get my daily dose of PR email. I usually skim and dump them. Most of them are barely worth that amount of attention. (I don’t even count the lame ones sent to the address where the domains are registered, asking for a ‘cooperation’ (translation: link exchange) with a “top rated web site with a Google PR of 0”. Huh?)

Recently, a few PR pitches came in that really illustrated examples of good, bad, and really, really bad PR things. They are presented here in case they may be of help to the universe. Actually, I just wanted to bitch.

Example: The Good

Received from 360i.com.

Hi Maki,

I’m not sure if you’ve heard the good news, but starting May 5th
Iron Chef Japan is back on the air after a very long hiatus.
Now every weeknight at 11pm you can catch Chairman Kaga, the
Iron Chefs, and a stream of hopeful challengers sweating it out
on Fine Living Network.

I thought you might want to give your readers a little heads up
about the premiere and share some vintage video clips with them.
My favorite is probably the one where the challenger uses this
crazy technique (fire, dry ice, and goggles….) to make
gourmet pasta, but Morimoto hacking thru a massive sea
bass comes in a close second… You can check them all
out on the Fine Living Network YouTube channel:
http://youtube.com/user/FineLivingVideos

There’s also an official website, which has a list of some
secret ingerdients [sic], bios of the chefs (did you know
that Chairman Kaga was once a Japanese Jesus?), etc:
http://www.fineliving.com/ironchefjapan

Feel free to share with your readers, and let me know if
you have any questions or feedback. Allez cuisine!

Why this was good:

• Most important: It’s obvious that the person who sent this had at least taken some time to peruse Just Hungry (possibly Just Bento too) to see that the focus of those blogs is on Japanese cooking. It’s possible they’d seen that I am a fan of some food shows on TV too (I’ve reviewed some on Just Hungry sporadically).
• It also included some fan-ish details, such as mentioning a favorite episode, and ending with the catchphrase of Iron Chef, Allez Cuisine.
• It included pertinent links of interest, should I deem this news worthy of blogging about. And they were real links, not some link to yet another PR blurb or something.
• It felt as though it was written by a human being. Even the typo was rather endearing. Not that I want PR releases to include planned typos.
• The sent from and reply-to email addresses - the same! A small detail, but it’s another thing that makes it at least seem as if the blurb is sent out individually.
• Finally, it just happened to be a subject that I was interested in and that my readers were interested in (as evidenced by the enthusiastic comments to my post about it). The PR company didn’t have direct control over this, but they did increase the probability that the news would get mentioned by doing a little homework.

Examples: The Bad

Received from - not sure really. The email addresses were confusing.

TO: Blog Writers and Editors
FROM: (name withheld)

What followed was something about some kind of food related jewelry or something. Frankly, as soon as I saw the TO:, my eyes glazed over and it went immediately to Junk.

I have to say that this type of PR pitch is the most common. It looks like people just do a general scan for food blogs, garnish email addresses or have some intern use the Contact forms, and shoot out the same form letter.

(A similar method is used quite often for book review requests. Newer food bloggers may be thrilled by the idea of getting free cookbooks to review, but I’m up to my eyeballs in cookbooks and I don’t really want any that are unlikely to be of much interest to me or the readers of my blogs. That’s another subject though.)

Example: The WTF

I have just stumbled upon your blog. I love the clean design and fantastic photos. I am a blogger myself and always thought that design was key and you have certainly captured that! There are so many food blogs out there these days and being different to all the others is key. I have just started (the site he was pimping) which is a website for chefs, foodies and food bloggers to hand out, share recipes, photos and videos. When i was blogging I always thought i should be getting more traffic as my blog was getting lost in the masses of stuff out there so my new site is aimed at giving food bloggers and chefs a bigger platform! Hope you enjoy it and keep up the good writing and design here! I have now bookmarked you so will be regular reader, Cheers!

There are several things wrong with this one.

• It was posted as a comment. Never, ever try to pimp something in comments. It really annoys most bloggers.
• It was posted as a comment, not on my food sites, but on my language site. It does have a title with Hungry in it, and used to be where Just Hungry resided. But anyone who had taken even a couple of seconds to glance through the site would have realized that it definitely was not a food site, and that it had none of my photos. Fail.