Pitch.Steve Del.icio.usly

Steve Rubel has asked people to start pitching him exclusively through del.icio.us, Pitch.Me Del.icio.usly. Following on an idea from Gawker media’s Nick Denton it looks as though del.icio.us may be the latest tool to help high profile bloggers avoid email spam.

I am getting overwhelmed with reader mail. Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing from you, but many of these are just link/PR pitches. I am going to try this approach. I ask from here on in that you please pitch me only via del.icio.us unless I already correspond regularly with you. I am doing this not only to cut down my mail but to make the PR pitching process transparent so that everyone can see what I blog/don’t blog. This will hopefully make those who pitch me better at what they do.

It will be interesting to see if this style of pitching will create a new industry standard, or as one comment in this post suggests, if it will just filter the spam into del.icio.us. I read Rubel’s blog regularly and I can also imagine that he receives legions of email pitches in a day, but I wonder about the utility of this practice – will it make things easier, or just move pitching in yet another new direction? More than anything, pitching through del.icio.us creates an new level of transparency, one that will require PR folks to think twice before sending out repetitive or impersonal pitches.