Frankie Flack: Don’t ignore PR people; tell them to get lost

When I talk to business journalists about flacks, they all have the same complaint: too much contact. Too much email. Too many phone calls. Especially from junior folks who haven’t learned the rules of the road.

I’m going to tell you all how to mitigate that problem. Listen up, hacks. If you heed my advice, you’ll see your inbound PR email cut in half over the course of six months. The solution here flows from a fundamental irony.

When I talk to flacks about journalists, it’s exactly the opposite of what reporters bitch about: PR pros feel like there is too little contact. Crickets when they send email. Phones that don’t ever ring. Especially from younger journalists who learned from an early age how to just ignore anything that doesn’t catch their fancy.

These two extremes create a vicious cycle. The less responsive a journalist is, the harder PR guys work to get attention. That means more emails. Phone calls. Tweets. LinkedIn invitations. Asking your garden-variety flack to send one email just one email and walk away, even in the absence of a response, is like asking a garage band to turn down the volume.

Sure, it might be a good idea. But it goes against our very nature. So my side isn’t going to back down. We’re going to keep pouring emails at you. And the less you say in response, the more emails we’ll send. It’s an arms race we’re going to win. There are more of us than there are of you. (More on that in a couple of weeks.)

If you want to break the cycle, here’s what you have to do: write back. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’ll work. You don’t have to write much. Just create a single line that can you cut-and-paste to every numbskull that sends you wildly inappropriate pitches. You don’t even have to be polite (though public shaming usually crosses a line). Use profanity if you’d like.

We’ll take the hint. We’ll remove you from our media list. We’ll tell our clients and our peers to handle you with care. We’ll back off on the email. It’ll take a few months for word to get around, but it’ll do the trick.

When I was young, before I started losing my hair and worrying about property tax rates, I was at a conference where I saw a high-profile wire reporter screaming on his cell phone at some hapless flack, berating the poor person on the other end for daring to disrupt what was already a busy and stressful show. It was a thing of terrible beauty, and I think I probably learned a few new words that day.

I’ve dealt with that reporter dozens of times since then, each time with the utmost care. No extra emails. No superfluous phone calls. He’s very pleasant, and I’ve gone out of my way to have beers with the guy. But he established a rep early, and damned if it didn’t stick.

So that’s the solution. Rather than ignoring us and thinking we’ll go away, take the extra six seconds and tell us to bug off instead of hoping that we’ll successfully mind-read and infer your lack of interest. Because you know what we’ll do if you’re clear? We’ll leave you be. Which is all you really wanted in the first place, right?