nice post. I understand exactly what you mean. I’m working as Marketing Cordinator in a Contact Centre. We offer a range of services and every time we sign up a new client, we realise that our business is not 100% understood.

Some enterprises never though that you can outsource your receptionist service, or you planning event helper, open your customer line 24 hours without any big investment.

Furthermore, I will ask… do other outsourcing companies (for instance PR companies) know how to benefit of a partnership with a contact centre?

Education is the key and Internet the channel!

I would say that job titles are tricky and my personal style is to use capitals where the title is used to denote a specific person e.g. … refer to your Client Executive, Peter Anscombe, Managing Director – but definitely postman not Postman. I realise that this is somewhat arbitrary.

Having just listened to the final overs of the test match today, where the BBC commentator referred to a batsman narrowly not given out as “Fortuitous” – lucky (fortunate) yes, but accidental? Surely not. What hope for a poor insurance worker if the BBC are so crass.
Peter

I seem to spend so much time re-working copy, which has been written by senior marketing or sales people working in large, well-known organisations. For me, over capitalisation is only part of the problem; the writing style is so often muddled and unclear with little or no thought for the reader’s needs.

Nice one Adrian, let’s hope you’ve begun to make people think a little bit more about their written work . . . . .

Properly targeted releases make money for your clients. Poorly targeted releases cost your client money.

Each pitching campaign needs to verify every name on the list, along with its spelling (often pronunciation too), proper title, beat, fone/e-mail contact info, and pitching preference. You only have a single opportunity to make a great first impression with a reporter.

As a former journalist myself, I can attest that journalists expect to get a certain number of unsolicited announcements. But if you listen to most big-city reporters–and, especially, tech reporters–it’s plain they’re being inundated and many of them resent receiving mistargeted pitches.

Even if reporters need PR content and contacts to do their job, we nonetheless can’t afford to irritate them–and especially not by sending them something that plainly has no value to their audiences–which we would have learned had we spent the time to research the media outlet’s audience(s), the reporter’s beats and what she’s written in the past. Journalists continually harp on this, but their advice too often falls on deaf, or closed, ears.

Journalists have little respect for anyone who doesn’t do her homework in approaching them, and practitioners who call to follow up on a mistargeted press release will only make matters worse for themselves and their client or employer.

Obviously, if you have a legitimate hard-news story that most outlets are going to be interested in covering, shotgunning your announcement won’t cause any problems.

But I think that we still should strive to find an acceptable line between best practice and operating solely on unconfirmed assumptions–IOW, between “good” and “good enough.”

Every media list I’ve ever seen that was created from commercial databases (Vocus, Cision, et. al.) has contained a significant number of wildly inappropriate inclusions and inaccurate listings. Granted, much of this stems from operator error (GIGO) in selecting the wrong parameters for choosing various categories of outlets, niches, etc. But my point is that we can never rely on uncorroborated press contacts.

Does anyone remember the old printed Bacon’s Media Directories? They were out-of-date from the moment they were published, and you had to wait a year to get corrected editions. Press databases are simple to access online nowadays, but the risk remains the same. The information contained in media databases is potentially already out-of-date, and we need to double-check everything.

If that sounds like a huge task, well–that’s why God makes interns! (And asst. A/E’s.) The larger the organization, the easier such homework becomes.