Day: August 7, 2003

Well, well, well. Another lesson in the art of redfacing by a PR practitioner.

According to a story at Up2Speed, a PR person at UK firm ESpotting, which has recently merged with FindWhat.com, sent out a press release cc’ing all 350 journalists in the distribution list of the e-mail. The press release in question, is a really exciting appointment announcement.

I won’t include the list of journalists as it’ll only make the spammers jobs easier.

Now normally when a PR person is called a buffoon, I would try and defend them.  In this case I agree with Up2Speed, but would like to use much stronger language.

Mail merge has been around for twenty years.  If you want a great example of poor online or electronic communication, this has to be this week’s case study.

Unbelievable.

Our friends at Google have added an interesting new feature for the poor beaten-up PR people of the world who need to track breaking news.

Google News Alerts allows you to create “news trackers” so when a story breaks they deliver it, along with a link to your inbox.

Michael O’Connor Clarke has a detailed review of the service and he rightly points out some obvious shortcomings, however credit where it’s due, it’s a useful addition to the monitoring arsenal. 

After all, if you want top of the range intelligent news monitoring, pay for a service.

Just like Google News, Google News Alerts is an added resource, not the answer to all your problems. 

Unfortunately like everything else in life, hard work still delivers the best results.