I get around three to four pitches a day from PR firms and they all suck. Some of them suck so badly I want to re-post them on my blog and make fun of them, but that’s not what I do here. Yet.

You don’t want to make their mistakes. Maybe you want your old boss to give you advice on your current job situation, or need a restaurant recommendation, or you want a blogger to write about reality TV star suicides. Whatever it is, here are four rules that apply:

1. Be personal.
Mass emails are interruptive advertising. They are the commercials I skip, the billboards I glaze over and the fliers that line the trash. If you have someone’s email, you should have their name. Use it.

But a name isn’t personal enough anymore. You know what’s personal? Showing that you respect me enough to know something about me. Anything. Talk about your mutual friend, your fellow obsession with brussels sprouts, or how you respect their blog/company/daughter and why.

Extreme targeting through the cultivation of conversations and relationships is the future of advertising. Big companies will do this by creating spaces where consumers will come to them and receive personalized value in return. You can do this by making it fun, easy and enjoyable to enter into a conversation with you and by showing the value you provide. You’re human. Act like it.

2. Be persistent.
There is no such thing as a perfect pitch. One, because it has to be customized for each person, and two because you can’t possibly know what each person will respond to unless you’ve worked with them before. Even then, people are fickle.

Everyone makes the first call. Everyone leaves one message. And everyone is also counting on you to give up. Maybe not the first time, but certainly the second or third. Don’t be a wuss. If your request is important, keep trying. People are busy, or maybe you didn’t pitch well enough the first time, or maybe they just want to see if you have the gumption to keep playing.

During college I was the top fundraiser for my university foundation. Here’s why. We had to make five asks in a phone call. Ninety percent of my co-workers would stop after one ask or get uncomfortable after the second. I made all five. Don’t give up.

3. Be specific.
People can’t read minds. Trust me, I’ve tested every boyfriend I’ve had. Nothing.

Most people don’t have specific requests. They send information or they send praise, but no call to action. Tell me what you want. It’s great that you’re writing an e-book on careers or it sucks that you’re having problems at work. And I’m glad that you love my blog, but is there something I can do for you? Then tell me. Follow through. Close the deal. It’s easy to do this by ending a conversation with a specific request:

“Can I count on you to give $100?”
“Does a 1:00 pm call on Thursday work?”
“Will you attend my restaurant opening?”

4. Say thank you. For the love of God.
My last job was all about keeping young professionals in the city. So when a candidate said she had been rejected by a local organization for a job, I asked her who the contact was. When it turned out to be someone I knew well, I offered to call my contact and ask that person to take a second look at the candidate. My contact agreed, the candidate was interviewed and was subsequently hired for a position.

And I never heard a thank you. Ever. That sort of thing happened all the time and what irks me even more is that it still does. Constantly. You have to show appreciation.

People don’t help you out of the goodness of their hearts. People help for two reasons: 1) they want to feel good when their advice or assistance pays off, and 2) they think by helping you, they can help themselves.

When I got my current position, I called the friend who got me in the door immediately to thank her. And then I sent her flowers. Oftentimes, when you ask for something, there’s not much you’re able to give back in return. A simple thank you goes a long way.

Pitch Point.

What’s worked for you? What hasn’t? Share your practical and creative tips below.

You’re more likely to enjoy your job if you make friends with your coworkers. But if you don’t have any co-workers, the challenge to not only enjoy your job, but to perform successfully in it, becomes immense.

That was one of the first things I noticed as I transitioned from being an employee to running an organization. There wasn’t anyone to talk to.

As many of us are taking the plunge from cubicle prisoner to being the boss, we’re stumbling over the entry gate. Support is the number one desire of newly-minted leaders and entrepreneurs. Who can understand the situations we’re in? Who can empathize and congratulate our failures and successes? Where is the team at?

I often tell my best friend Belle about Guy A who sucks at life, or Situation B that just rocked my week. She empathizes, congratulates, and is a good friend, but she has no idea about the foolishness or magnanimity of either like a co-worker would.

Co-workers have shared experiences that they can talk about and understand, and they support each other. They know exactly who Guy A is and are acutely aware of how important Situation B is. It’s a unique bond that can’t be replaced by even the best mentor or friend.

Here’s how to deal with no co-workers:

1) Manage yourself differently. Being a leader is about making sacrifices. This is one of them. It’s part of the package, so you just have to deal with it. Dealing with no co-workers, however, does not mean relying on Ben & Jerry, my good friends of a few weeks ago. You have to maintain your healthy habits – perhaps journaling and exercise – and create new ones.

For me, this means changing my mindset. It’s letting go of things that would have bothered me in the past. It’s looking at situations differently, and oftentimes strategically. It’s realizing that people will treat me differently, and that’s what I signed up for. Mostly, it’s concentrating on what makes my position exciting and fun.

2) Start a support network. In the upper-echelons of CEOs and Presidents, support groups are quite common. Company leaders often get together for breakfast or lunch roundtables and share the challenges of running an organization. They’ve defined it differently, but really they’re simply building co-worker relationships.

It would be difficult, however, for a young leader to find value from these roundtables outside of a mentor relationship.

Generation Y leaders need to create their own groups, and those groups need to respond to how we work. Being a young leader has its own set of unique challenges. If we’re going to be taking on positions of authority earlier, and creating our own rules, we need to be honest about what those challenges are.

3) Lean on people who know nothing. As is often true, weaknesses are also strengths. While Belle cannot fulfill the role of my co-worker, I am much happier with her as my friend. You need to have people that are outside of the work/life blender to keep perspective.

Belle doesn’t come to any of my organization’s events. She doesn’t know the majority of the people. She leads a completely different life. And while we don’t have those shared experiences, it is for that reason that it’s refreshing to be around her. I’ve known her so long that I’m not defined as a young leader, as a Gen Y Princess, a blogger, or as an Executive Director. I’m just me. And that’s a big deep breath of happiness.

Co-workin’ it.

Having a bad boss doesn’t excuse you from being a good employee. And good employees manage up.

This works because work relationships are all about control. Your boss may be threatened that you’re young and intelligent, may not want to give you more responsibility, could be on a power-trip, or might just be an inexperienced manager. There could be any number of reasons why he’s not so nice.

But if you had more control at your job – if you could be in charge of more or your boss could be in charge of less, things would be better off, right? Managing up allows you to retain your sense of poise and productivity, and requires that you:

1. Perform like you’ve never performed before. It doesn’t matter if your boss told you to wash dishes. If that’s your task, you had better be the best darn dish-washer there ever was. It’s really hard for a boss to complain if you’re doing everything right and smiling about it. And you’ll feel better after accomplishing something instead of complaining

Besides, no one gets to skip paying dues all together. Sometimes the workplace is dirty, unethical and downright salacious, but you should never be a part of that. By complaining and not doing, you’re being complicit in a negative environment instead of showing your real value and true work ethic.

2. Realize what the real point of working is. Even if you feel like you can run miles around what you’re doing or on the flip side, that your task is too difficult, realize that the opportunity in most jobs is not to learn a specific or creative skill, but to learn people skills, which are far more important at the end of the day.

It’s people skills that differentiate you and help you succeed over anything else. That’s why you’re actually lucky to have a bad boss. There will never be a deficiency of difficult people at your job or in your life. This is a prime opportunity to use that to your advantage.

3. Discover what your boss cares about and learn to care too. For example, I once had a boss that would bully me in private and become my best friend in public. Her main concern was image, mostly hers.  Once I understood this, I took less of what she said to heart, and focused mainly on tasks that would increase the positive sentiment of our organization publicly. I never failed to compliment her to others, and so I knew when she said, “I’ve been hearing great things about you,” she really meant “I’ve been hearing great things about myself.”

Your boss could equally care about leaving at 5:00 pm to see his kids, or pushing through her pet project on eco-friendly envelopes, or making sure he never has to write notes at a meeting again. Whatever the push-point is, find it and use it to make your boss look good. Real good.

4. Care like you and your boss are real people. Because you both are. Not all of us are suited to be inspirational leaders, and most of us don’t realize how difficult it really is to be a good manager. And many more don’t even realize that the onus is truly on the employee to bring out the best in a manager. Where would Obama be without the ideas and enthusiasm of the American citizens for change?

Your participation, empathy and respect towards your boss will be reflected in how your boss treats you. Try reverence for a change.

I pride myself on being direct and being experienced enough as a freelancer to know
better. So why do I find it so difficult to bring up the dreaded topic of money and billing rates especially when I’ve already submitted a proposal to a client and go the extra step of doing initial exploratory work free-of-charge?

Me talk money one day

This particular instance which I’ve described above recently happened to me.

I felt even more worthless when I got off the phone with said client and realized I was so busy trying to sell myself that I’d forgotten to bring up my rates. In all honestly, my proposal outlined my hourly billing rates and he had skimmed it and given his initial “ok” but we’d never had a conversation specifically related to how much he was planning on paying me.

Ambiguity doesn’t sit well with me and in business, it’s the kiss of death. I realize that if I can’t have such a conversation with my potential client it might not bode well for our relationship longevity, but I opt not to think so deeply on this one. I don’t think it’s such a simple cause-and-effect.

I choose to think that much like I don’t like having to tell my boss I’m taking a vacation and might conveniently forget to mention it a few times before I eventually bring it up, this is another example of a conversation I’d rather not have because it makes me

uncomfortable and ok, if you want to get deep here, I fear (more than the rejection) that ugly word: Conflict.

I’m not throwing in the towel on this project or this client. Yesterday I had to send him a document I created and I used that as an opportunity to remind him of my rates. Sure, it’s a bit of a pansy move and it does little to further the line of DIRECT communication, but work with me here. It’s a start.

Worker Biatch is a wannabe Gen Xer (or “Millenial” as those labelists like to emphatically reduce her existence to) that has spent too much time in a cubicle. It’s a good thing she doesn’t go by labels or should might more accurately describe herself as a cusp middle child, stuck somewhere between the Xs and the Ys. Whatever the case may be, she’s accumulated some serious material over her years. She’s convinced this material hasn’t been too kind to her fragile psyche, but has made her a much wiser person overall and most likely funnier as a result.