The Falling on your Facebook Pitch

Riddle me this. What’s wrong with this pitch?
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Kevin,

Did you happen to catch Marlo Thomas on the Today Show last week talking about her new discovery, “the Facebook?”

Hopefully you're not just learning about the social network Facebook.com from That Girl. But the truth is, today's media landscape is shifting too fast for even many bloggers to keep up with on their own. So…begins the pitch sent to me by a big agency that should know better.
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The pitch starts with a timely hook. But would you infer that a nerdy marketing blog might be unaware of Facebook? The pitch concerns a Web 2.0 topic…so these folks should know enough to run their targets through Google to search and find the term.

E-mail can be misinterpreted…easily. Is your pitch pithy? Does it read pithy? Or will it simply pith someone off? Take it from someone who’s used humor incorrectly a lot before. The leap from joke to laugh may not seem wide, but if you fall, it’s a long way down. Humor is subjective.

Had they started the second graph with “While you are well aware of Facebook, clearly not everyone is.” By linking to one of my posts discussing social networks, they show they've done their homework. And I’d be posting about them on my other blog instead.

Does this read petty? It’s not meant to be. The site being pitched is pretty cool. But the pitch gives me a ham-fisted first impression.

P&G spends millions to ensure a customer’s first moment of truth with a product will be a good one. Consider that an editor’s first moment of truth with your client and its product(s)/service(s) may be your pitch.

Does this make you want to re-write it? Good.

more facebook art… uploaded by donlbe
tags | public relations | PR | media relations | media | good pitch | bad pitch | bad pitch blog | Facebook