Day: May 26, 2003

• Deborah Branscum is back blogging with her usual sharp observations, this time Jayson Blair is in the crosshairs.
• Richard Bailey is regrettably still in absentia due to work committments but he’s written a good article on writing for the web.
• Mitch Wagner’s word for today is something unlikely to ever affect you as a PR professional… Underload syndrome.
• PR Newswire’s Media Insider (subscription required)  has an article on tips for pitching over e-mail.  Not exactly rocket science, to summarize:

1. Don’t respond to a pitch unless you have the perfect match.
2. Do keep your pitches very short and to the point.
3. Don’t attach files.
4. Don’t pitch someone if they are not available to be interviewed.

There is truly nothing worse than death by PowerPoint. When you are on a press or analyst tour with multiple meetings every day, the pain of going through the same slides, with the same quips over and over again is probably the most ingenious form of torture known to mankind.

It doesn’t help that people seem to put more preparation into their slides than their content.  We’ve all been in the presentations where the speaker simply reads each slide word for word. It’s bad communication and worse, the speaker provides no additional information. It would probably be better to just let the slides run automatically without the sound track.

Edward Tufte has an essay on the subject called “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”. It’s available for $7. Anything that helps is to be welcomed! Thanks to my colleague Darren Barefoot for the link!

 

When e-mail started to become popular in the early to mid-nineteen nineties it was common to hear excuses such as “I never got that e-mail” and in some cases – as there were still glitches in e-mail – it was true.  However, as e-mail has become ubiquitous it’s not really an acceptable excuse anymore.

Over the past couple of months a new e-mail related excuse has begun to become popular.  “Your e-mail was stuck in my spam software”. If you’re working in PR, your e-mail address is probably on websites, on posted press releases etc. and as a result you are probably getting hundred of spam messages every day.  Most of us have turned to anti-spam software to solve the problem, but as anyone who uses these products knows, they are far from the finished article.  Indeed they only seem to catch fifty percent of the spam and fifty percent of the e-mail they do catch isn’t spam.

So remember when someone tells you that they never got your e-mail, but they subsequently did find it in their spam folder, you heard it here first!

Of course technical glitches like those experienced by Trend Micro’s anti-spam product (where any e-mail containing the letter ‘P’ is categorized as spam) doesn’t help matters very much. Thanks to Phil Gomes for the link!