Missing the Mark: How Can We Be Doing PR better?

I’ve been following Matt Gross from popular music blog The Music Slut on Twitter for the past few weeks.  Typically I look to his tweets for insight on new tracks, videos, and happenings in the music world.
Yesterday, he made three successive tweets about the way music PR people approach him with pitches and it really got me thinking: am I being annoying too?

We talk about this a lot at bigMETHOD, and have always made a sincere effort to maintain a level of truly personal communication with anyone we contact in the blogosphere.  We don’t do press releases, we don’t do spam – we try our best to send information only to writers we really think would appreciate the content, and overall we simply try to keep it real.
But is that enough?  Looking at Matt’s tweets about the way other PR agencies are contacting bloggers, it’s becoming clear that the short answer is probably “No.”  My role is to be a direct connection between artists and their most influential fans and tastemakers.  We think simply by keeping things real and straightforward, we’re not being annoying. But maybe we’re wrong.

So we decided to go directly to the source and figure out: how can we best do our job promoting artists without being completely obnoxious to the folks we rely on?  Starting this afternoon, I’m going to pose this question to a number of the bloggers who I’ve been in contact with recently.  Then we’re going to take the information, quote them on it, and post it right here on the blog for other PR folks to reference.  Maybe this will help us all come together on being a little less annoying.