Obviously, there’s been a lot of talk about PR pitches gone bad. Stowe Boyd coined the word Twit Pitches last month. The concept is to force PR firms to use the economy of words (characters?) to pitch bloggers. It’s a reality in life, and I fight with my wife on this regularly, that no one cares about your “thing” as much as you do and so are less likely to want to give you the time to “pitch” the story or idea. You need to be quick, succinct and use compelling hooks.
Thus, the Twitter Pitch was born.
I’m releasing a new plugin that I hacked together over the weekend called WP-Twitterpitch that I’m also running here at Technosailor. Check out the navigation for a demo.
WP-TwitterPitch is all about getting the pitch delivered to you in the form you want to get it delivered - in other words in Twitter format. If you’re like me, then your Twitter direct message box is a lot like your email inbox. Personally, I don’t want to get pitches from PR companies in certain email inboxes. For whatever reason, I may not check them or they are personal, etc.
Twitter, however, provides the ultimate quick-messaging system. This plugin provides a template tag that you can drop anywhere in your theme. Clicking the link provides lightbox-like functionality for a “pitch form”. Using the form does not require a Twitter account (but does require that you have a secondary Twitter account you can use for this purpose, since you can’t send Direct Messages to yourself via Twitter). Note: Your WP-TwitterPitch Twitter account must follow the account that is being pitched and vica versa. This is a one-off action (hopefully, depending on Twitter) and only needs to be done when setting up WP-TwitterPitch.
Messages sent from the form are DMmed to the account getting the pitch and the form is limited to 140 characters or less. The beauty of linguistic efficiency.
wp-twitterpitch folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directoryas, as well as a message to “pitchers” that will be displayed in the form after the pitch has been sent.
Place <?php twitterpitch(); ?> wherever you want the link to appear
If you find yourself doing a lot of repetitive tasks all the time, and you’re a Firefox user, I definitely recommend iMacros from iOpus, which I’ve covered before here. The download for this Firefox extension is free, and it shows up as a button on your browser toolbar for easy availability.
The iMacros application lets you record, edit, name and organize macros for every kind of repetitive browser-based task you do. Recording macros with iMacros is very easy and requires no coding on your part. You just perform your regularly executed tasks, and it records what you do.
While iMacros is an extension for Firefox, many widely used productivity applications let you easily record and use macros directly from within your application. For a very easy set of instructions for building macros in Microsoft Word, check here.
Speaking of productivity applications, Excel has a long history of macro development done on a community basis, and there are huge books collecting useful macros for the spreadsheet application. You can find many collections of pre-built Excel macros online for free. If you want to get started recording your own macros for Excel, check here.
Macros are big time-savers if you’re willing to put a little work into mastering how to build, record and manage them. You definitely need no programming knowledge to get started.
Do you know of any good macro collections, applications, or how-to’s?
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