Survey Questions Efficiency of E-mail for PR Communications

As with any professional service, there are different tactics used by agencies and the individuals who work on their behalf to carry out public relations campaigns. While conventional media relations is just one of many potential elements to a PR campaign, it's often the largest and in some cases the only element of a company's campaign, which it makes its success vitally important to a client.

Until the proliferation of e-mail, the predominant ways PR practitioners used to communicate with journalists were either sending printed material through the mail or just plain old pitching using the telephone. Pitching changed a lot when e-mail became commonplace, as it brought a lot of communication that used to be phone-based and moved it to e-mail. This has occurred not just with PR pitching, but with mainstream business communication in general. Take a tour through a major office these days and, unless it's a call center, you'll likely notice it's much quieter than it used to be.

Obviously, opinions on e-mail for PR communication are divided. Some claim it's not effective, while other practitioners such as myself have found it works wonders. The fact that opinions do remain divided means it's one of those issues that are the subject of surveys and studies, the latest of which was released today by the International Association of Business Communicators.

A total of 85 percent of respondents said e-mail overload is having a negative impact on their productivity, a number that jumped to 93 percent in the case of users of PDAs like Treos and Blackberries. Sixty-two percent of the respondents as a whole said they were getting too much e-mail, while 75 percent of PDA users responded likewise. The two largest culprits were identified as "external news sources" and professional subscriptions, such as e-mail newsletters the recipients willingly sign up for.

Some PR practitioners and those who write about the profession will look at this survey and say, "dump e-mail, it doesn't work." However, I'd say it says nothing like that at all. As anyone who's served as a journalist at a major outlet and they'll tell you the problem isn't how the communication is sent, but rather the volume as a whole. In other words, there's just too much stuff sent around that the recipient has no interest in. It would make as much of a bad phone pitch as it would an e-mail pitch, only a voice pitch would take up more than twice as much of the reporter or editors time. Multiply that by the 100 or more e-mails received in a day and then you'll get an understanding of what it means to have an impact on productivity.

So what's the answer? Stop sending so much stuff to people who have no interest in it. Rather than using a media database alone, here's a thought.... actually read the publication you're pitching and find out who's specifically been writing on the subject germane to what your client has to say. If you follow this approach, you'll have a higher rate of success no matter whether people are using the phone or whatever the successor to e-mail proves to be.