Steve Rubel on The Twitpitch

About a year after I wrote about trying to convince PR professionals to pitch me on Twitter instead of email (see Twitpitch Is The Future, Twitpitch Me, and related posts), Steve Rubel reports on a trend where PR people are pitching via Twitter. I call this Twitpitching, but Steve steers away from that terminology, or any mention that the practice has been going on at least for a year or so.

[via Micro Persuasion: Could Twitter One Day Replace Email PR Pitches? Maybe]

[…] more of my inbound and outbound communication these days is in the form of Twitter direct messages or, sometimes, public replies. The direct messages arrive through email, but I find myself often reviewing or responding to these in one of my preferred Twitter clients - either Tweetie or TwitterGadget.

At first I despised the bacn. Now, however, I embrace it. What’s more, I have come to see the benefits of direct messages and its potential for PR. It has me wondering: can direct message pitches become an accepted practice that journalists can live with?

I don’t know about journalists, but I think anything that pulls PR blather out of the closed discourse of email is good: the unlimited scope of the medium allows all the worst of press releases to continue — bullshit quotes that no CEO ever said, third party marketspeak, the torrent of superlatives.

And pulling this all into open social discourse — not direct messages, Steve — is equally beneficial. Let everyone see the hype, let the community reply immediately to the bushwa that vendors are trying to pass off as newsworthy. Let the Edglings shape the discussion.

Steve tiptoes through this, though:

Now some pitches could be public tweets, others will have to be private direct messages depending on their nature. And of course Twitter will never replace email pitching entirely.

Yes, marketeers working around embargoed information might need to resort to direct messages, but otherwise I would steer them out into the open.

And I am leery of formulations like ‘Of course, new communication medium X will never replace old communication medium Y.’

I recall how people almost hooted me off the stage a few years ago when I suggested that the rise of the social web would lead to the death of newspapers. ‘Oh, Stowe,’ they cried, ‘you can’t say that newspapers — so important to democracy, and a pillar of our society — would ever fade away. You are crazy.’

I was almost tarred and feathered at Supernova 2004 for suggesting that email was not going to be the killer app of the new web, and that advances based on the instant messaging paradigm — buddylists, presence, fast twitch — would replace it. (See Email Blows).

So, I may be a bit ahead of the curve, but I will say it here: Steve is too cautious by half, and open press relations is the future. Smart PR professionals will move away from closed discourse — direct messages, email, etc. — and conduct business in public, to the degree that it is possible.

And the Press — to the degree that we will have a ‘Press Corps’ per se, in the future — will be online in the open, too.