Reinventing the Pitch Letter with Delicious

One of the tactics PR professionals sometimes use is the open letter. Basically, this is a public letter to the world that you publish for everyone to see. Famous open letters include Bill Gates' letter to hobbyists and Google CEO Eric Schmidt's open letter on Net Neutrality. It used to be you'd publish it in a newspaper, then later on Web sites. Now, Ozgur Alaz has reinvented this timeless tactic using del.icio.us.

Using del.icio.us' network feature, Ozgur has developed a hack to send messages people you want to connect with, even if you don't know their email address. Basically, you find the del.icio.us ID of the person or people you want to send message to, you add them to your network, write them a message at shorttext.com, then bookmark this URL on del.icio.us and tag it for: username. You could send the message to several people all at once, including all of the most prolific bookmarkers on the site.

Open letters are just one possibility here. What if PR pros used this methodology to pitch reporters and/or bloggers who frequent del.icio.us regularly? You could pitch 10 reporters at once in an open way. Interesting. Great hack Ozgur.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us

Comments

[Kingsley Joseph]

Steve, I agree it's inventive, but did you just endorse spam?

[Dave Duarte]

That rocks!

[Jeremy Pepper]

First, what ever happened to the personalized pitch. Going open source on delicious to reporters is an equivalent of SPAM, without even the pretense that you read their copy.

And, second, I recently said that delicious is the most dangerous tool to PR. It is, and if you don't believe that, wait until a client gets tagged something negative on delicious, and it shows up in Google.

[Marshall Kirkpatrick]

Didn't you some time ago ask people to tag items for:steverubel to submit them for your consideration? Wondering how that's worked for you.

[Ryan]

I'm not sure how you can endorse this, but disagree with Netscape editors' decision to seed a Netscape-friendly story written by someone else. I think this is far more damaging to social networking, personally.

[Joseph]

Agree with other commenters that this sounds a lot like spam. Luckily in del.icio.us, there is an opt-out ("ignore this user") feature, but I bet this tactic will get people's attention only once.

[Eric Ward]

Sure you can do this. Abusing net related technology isn't anything to marvel at, though. There are countless ways to force a message onto someone's screen using social media tools or other tactics. Being clever enough to figure out how does not mean you then should do it.

As a web content publicist in my 13th year, I have seen what works and what doesn't, and made mistakes along the way. Social Media Pollution, like blog comment spam, or tag spam, or press release spam, just makes the user experience worse for everyone. Don't kill the goose.

[Candace]

I agree this is really cool and potentially very useful. However, like Jeremy, I'm worried about the spam factor. Any thoughts?

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

Great!
penis enhancement pitches in my newsreader!

[jbr]

for at least 3 years, i have often wondered if an aspiring movie maker would use blogs, etc to "pitch" movies to the studios....with youtube and the like, it would seem possible to create a innovative/remarkable trailer to take the place of a written pitch....similar to your letter scenario, create a trailer and tag it to the desired audience....

[Steve Rubel]

Candace, it depends. If the process is open, then reporters can see if some of the links that are submitted to them are interesting. I do see the spam issue, but I like that reporters/bloggers/etc have an opt out. It's probably best if you use your first link to ask permission.

Marshall, lots of people pitch me that way. It works. I get some of my best links from the for: function.