Earlier today, Marshall Kirkpatrick posted some great advice at ReadWriteWeb: Five Wrong Ways to Pitch RWW and One Great Way. Here's a quick list:

• Wrong: Email the wrong email address
• Wrong: Phone Calls
• Wrong: Twitter, Especially DM
• Wrong: Facebook
• Wrong: IM

Instead:

A Great Way to Do It: By RSS
...
PR people, please send us the RSS feeds of your clients' blogs and news releases.

That applies for most blogs, not just ReadWriteWeb.

Matt Craven adds some perspective at The Blog Herald:

To this day - almost eighteen month after leaving the editor position here, we still get stories pitched to us at that email address - often on topics that aren’t in any way, shape, or form what we’re interested in blogging about. I never once was sent a RSS feed or an OPML file. And I can’t remember a single story that we ran based on an email pitch from a PR firm - the quality was extraordinarily poor.

(They probably ran stories based on direct pitches from small companies; those tend to be more targeted.)

Alas, some commenters don't get it. Perhaps they've never been on the receiving end of such a flood:

It should NOT matter WHAT tactics people use to pitch something to you.

You both need each other to survive - so stop patronizing others when you yourselves are no less imperfect.

Posted by: SearcH◆ EngineS WEB | April 18, 2008 8:52 AM

I sounds as if you want everyone else to do your information management. It's true everyone is overloaded with information these days and finds it hard to cope.

But you shouldn't ever take it out on the people who are contacting you.

Posted by: Haniff Din | April 18, 2008 9:29 AM

I'll give sarahintampa the last word:

Everyone, Please Breathe. Chill.

It’s just a suggestion people. Take it or leave it.

Just…doesn’t it make sense that when you’re telling a blogger about a new service/product that you would also encourage them to subscribe to the companies feed(s)?