Day: February 2, 2009

I have always taken the conservative route along the road of “naming and shaming” embarrassingly inept PR e-mail pitches based on the glasshouse theory.

The reality is that we ALL have bad days at the office.  In truth I fear that the one time I do name and shame it’ll come back to bite me – call it the coward’s dilemma.

However, it appears to me that the volume of these PR e-mails seems to be increasing.

My favourite piece of PR Spam today is so wrong on a number of levels. 

Firstly, what value does this blog have for any client interested in reaching a broad audience? None.

So the agency is wasting their client’s “time” – although you could argue spamming thousands of blogs doesn’t take a lot of time at all – and maybe by spamming they believe they are saving time.

Secondly spamming me about a service for a “phone” that I have never blogged about (a cursory look at my bio would underline why it’s highly unlikely I ever would blog about that particular phone – send your guesses to someone else’s e-mail address) is pretty dumb.

Finally spamming me about a service that’ll help me “date on the go” doesn’t really fit with:

1. the irregular musings on this blog
2. my marital status

There was a time I used to gently reply to these twits and try and help them see the error of their ways.  Now I don’t bother.

Hopefully some of them will come to their senses. If this is the “value” we’re offering our clients, we’re in trouble.

Postscript:

Just as I hit publish I got a really interesting pitch on a medical records company. Sigh.

Browsing through many neglected RSS feeds today, there wasn’t a lot that tickled my fancy (so to speak).

Once again, I did see a couple of posts that probably should have been held in a “drafts” folder overnight – and then deleted. 

I don’t wish to pour salt on the wounds, but there are a couple of PR bloggers who would be well advised to take a deep breath before hitting publish.  I mean it’s never nice to lose a client, but writing a post on why the client was wrong (thankfully without naming names) is at best ill-advised – no matter how much better you feel about it – and writing posts in that vein every time you lose a client, can start to look as though your business is dissolving in real-time. Perception is, after all, often reality.

Enough said.

Over time you see the PR blog community converging on a small number of similar themes. 

It will be no surprise that Twitter continues to be the subject of much attention, for example:

• Drew offers 10 ways Twitter can be useful to a PR practitioner
• Dave Fleet offers a list of 40 PR-related people to follow on Twitter.
• Andrew Smith ponders the challenge of so little time, so many Tweets.

Elsewhere the subject of “social media” is attracting some commentary from the UK fraternity.

The Chartered Institute of PR has released “Social Media Guidelines” (hat tip to Richard Bailey). (Disclaimer: In true blogging fashion I haven’t actually read the guidelines (though it has been added to an ever-growing “to-read” list), but I know some men who have.)

Stuart thinks they’re half-baked, while Simon points out that there’s some legal poetic license in there.

The cynics might say that about sums up Social Media. LOL.  Not me obviously gentle reader, no, not me.