PR flacks

So sorry to hear about your bad experience with the PR agency – I guess this doesn’t help much, but I would like to apologise on behalf of the PR profession – most of us are absolutely professional, and are horrified when lazy PRs drag our reputation down.

In addition to Aunty B’s advice that you approach a different journalist (perhaps the one at the competitor newspaper, this time anticipating that the PR hasn’t done a good job), can I suggest that it’s important you go back to the original journalist, he or she of the unrepeatable swear words? For two reasons: firstly, it’s not in your best interests to have a journo out there who thinks badly of your company (especially due to a slack PR). Secondly, the journo has done you a big favour by telling you why your story didn’t run – and saving you from throwing good money after bad to the PR company.

Suggest you put together an email that starts with some humour about the stuff up, then moves onto something that you’re confident is valuable – ideally, other news or a case study – or failing that, perhaps you’ve new insights into topics the journo writes about?

At the end of the day, you’ve now got a relationship with the journalist. It’s currently a bad relationship: but it is possible, and perhaps even important, to turn it into a good one.