How Not To Handle Phone Calls

Photo by Annie Spratt

Hi everyone
 

Hope you're well.

Firstly, thank you so much for your kind messages and support after my last email. Many of you shared your own personal experiences of brain fog and fatigue, showing clearly that there's definitely a kind of pandemic burnout hanging over us. Or indeed, long Covid.

I've wanted to talk about phone calls for a while. I was prompted to cover the subject earlier in the week after a PR left me a voice message. Now I know cold pitching is god damn hard, never mind when you're trying to sell in a story over the phone and I note it's often the younger PRs encouraged to do this. Now in the most recent voicemail left by a PR I couldn't even tell you what she said, who she was, or where she was calling from. She clearly wanted to get the call over and done as soon as possible, but it just left her message completely incomprehensible. 

Another thing to be beware of is the length of the voicemail. Often I have messages from PRs that are three minutes long. THREE MINUTES. No one should leave a voice message that long. And often what I'm hearing is a whole press release being read out to me. "Hi Susie, I'm calling from x. Our client is launching a new solutions tool to create the perfect hybrid office." I know many experienced PRs don't do this, but just to say, please don't come across as robotic or as if you're reading from a press release. If you need to leave a voice message pitching in a story, and to be honest, no one really does for me (I don't work on a news desk), make it brief, interesting, and get to the point quickly: why should I be writing about it?

Have a great rest of the week.

Thanks

Susie