All main categories are now fed into their own Twitter page

I was listening to a recent edition of the often excellent For Immediate Release in which they were discussing PR as spam.

Basically, this means the use of PR that borders on annoying irritation and that ends up in the bin rather than leading to results and coverage.

One person on the board was blogger and PR social media guy Stowe Boyd, and his comments inspired me to take action:

"When ever a person sends me a pr pitch by email I very nicely send them an email back saying this is how I would like to be pitched which is not by email, please do it by Twitter. The reason I like to do it by Twitter is that it is short and sweet as it is 140 characters.

"Just recently at the Web 2.0 conference I opened up my email and I had 60 pieces of email from PR people who wanted me to read their item, set up meetings, whatever.

"And I thought, If this only takes a minute for each one I'll be spending an hour going through these emails just to find a nugget of gold that is really interesting to me and I'm not going to do it as I'm wasting too much time.

"So it got to a breaking point for me so I posted this thing called a Twit pitch, which is pitch me by Twitter and do it in the open and in public so that everybody else can see it.

"I got a pretty good response, 10-15% PR people took offence, but it's a largely popular response. I get a couple of pitches a day and I'm happy with it."

Correspondingly I have set up Twitter pages for all the main categories on Press Release 001. Feeding off the RSS feeds, updates to Twitter are done automatically. I expressly set this up with the intention of it being a resource for journalists and bloggers, so I've also now started editorially reviewing all submissions before they are published.

Most items submitted to this site are really not very good, at least, they are not press releases they are just marketing pitches and are often little better than spam.

When you write a press release do the following. Put yourself in the shoes of a blogger or journalist: would you write a story based on the information that is in your press release? What is in your story that you, if you were a journalist or blogger, would be able to write about? Are you announcing anything? Are you announcing something of interest? If the answer is no - and I tell you now that is the case with the majority of items submitted here - then re-write it, or write a new one.

As from now all marketing promotional material sent to Press Release 001 won't be binned but will be re-categorised at "promotional" by the editorial team.

Here are the URLs of all the associated Twitter pages:

Agriculture:
http://twitter.com/PR001Agricult

Arts:
http://twitter.com/PR001Arts

Business:
http://twitter.com/PR001Business

Celebrity:
http://twitter.com/PR001Celebrity

City News:
http://twitter.com/PR001CityNews

Construction:
http://twitter.com/PR001Construct

Dating:
http://twitter.com/PR001Dating

Education:
http://twitter.com/PR001Education

Entertainment:
http://twitter.com/PR001Entertain

Environmental:
http://twitter.com/PR001Environ

Fashion:
http://twitter.com/PR001Fashion