Adrian Bridgwater, a freelance journalist and social media friend of mine tweeted yesterday that he was going to share his golden rules of public relations. 
I have been following Adrian for a while now and I find his insights, from the other side of the fence, interesting. So I started to read some of these rules and although most were obvious and clear common sense I could tell that PR professionals had broken a lot of them pretty regularly.
So if you if you want to avoid any mishaps when approaching journalists with a story here are his golden rules of PR:
1. If you have never mailed a certain journo before, say hello in a three line mail before jumping straight in.
2. If a journo’s landline is engaged, calling their mobile will not go down well….
3. Reading your pitch out is certain death
4. Act like a client, THINK like a creative writer and journalist
5. Don’t put juniors with English as their second language on the phone for follow ups
6. If a journalist has JUST covered a topic, we will NOT be covering it again that day (generally speaking)
7. “My client does this stuff with cloud, are you interested?” <- no, so what?
8. Don’t send embargoed news datelined tomorrow without offering it first
9. Listen to what the client wants, right up until the point when you don’t have to, then go and implement
10. A survey is generally not news
11. An executive on a plane is definitely not news 🙂
12. Never use “We’re really excited about this new partnership.”
13. Never use “We’re evidencing our strong commitment to Java, brown sauce etc//…. by this new initiative which …..
14. Never use UNIQUE – nothing is unique except John Lennon and Vimto OK?
15. Super excited? Don’t even go there. I mean, come on honestly!
16. Is this a good time to call?” probably not, but if you’d mailed a quick one liner first it might be
17. We do value PR people, consider the plight of the journalist left at MSFT Mix with no agency to interplay to!
Adrian in fact spent seven years working for Brodeur PR back in the nineties before becoming a full time journalist, perhaps that should be an enforceable training ground for all press? It would never happen right?
Do you have a golden rule of PR? If so let me know in the comments and we will add it to the list.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
