One thing we like doing and talking about on FIR is experimenting with different and new ways of communicating. And if you have a point of view you want to share with the FIR community, you have multiple ways of […]
Month: May 2008
Things didn’t go to plan yesterday for the fourth episode of FIR Live on BlogTalk Radio. Shel’s posted a note on the FIR blog about our cancellation of the call-in show half way through, the reasons for which included poor […]
Content summary: Disney closes a user community; Neville’s tech minute; how social media affects reporters and media coverage; the value of an apology; Ricardo on Spanglish; listener comments; reports from Dan York, David Phillips, and Ricardo from Costa Rica; music […]
I spent most of Tuesday at The Innovation Edge, a one-day conference and exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, London. Put very simply, The Innovation Edge “aims to provoke thought and encourage debate about innovation.” It was organized by NESTA. […]
Like many in the PR and journalism blogosphere, I get PR pitches by email every day.
Like many, too, I welcome pitches if they are relevant to my interests. If they are, the chances are good that I will talk about the product or service, either in my blogs or podcast, or I might Twitter about it.
Those emails are currently averaging eight. Every day. The vast majority, though, I regard as spam, pure and simple.
In fact, PR spam is a topic that is constantly on the tips of online tongues.
What’s my definition of ‘PR spam’? Any one or all of this:
- The product or service being pitched by email is so obviously not one that I would have much interest in, a fact that would be very easily apparent if the pitcher had taken even a cursory glance at this blog or listened to my podcast.
- The email includes an unsolicited Word document attachment. And it’s worth noting that not everyone uses Word. I do but the pitcher doesn’t know that.
- The pitcher writes a pseudo-friendly greeting but it only looks like a bad database mail merge. My favourite: “Hi, Neville ,” (notice the space between my name and the final comma). A close second is the simple “Hi ,” with that same space (yes, I’ve had lots of emails like that).
Mostly, I regard such PR spam is just another consequence of being online and being accessible. You know, along with the email offers for knock-off replica watches, Viagra and other sexual performance enhancements, and winning the Euro lottery.
This is borne out by the majority of those emails being automatically caught by the McAfee spam and junk mail filters in Outlook.
Now and again, I might send one along to Kevin Dugan for the Bad Pitch Blog although lame PR pitches are no longer hot news items for that blog.
There are just too many of them.
All that said, I do get increasingly worried for the overall reputation of our profession as if I’m getting such crap every day, imagine what journalists working in the mainstream media must be getting.
Yesterday, General Motors Europe launched Driving Conversations, a new executive blog. We have an exclusive FIR interview with Chris Preuss, GM Europe’s Vice President of Communications, about the new blog, recorded a few days ago ahead of the public launch. […]
One of the earliest adopters of social media for a strategic business communication purpose is General Motors, whose FastLane blog began in January 2005. FastLane has been said by Bob Lutz, founding blogger and the company’s Vice Chairman, to be […]
Content summary: New FIR Interview published; FIR Live on BlogTalk Radio May 24; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on internet control in China and asks about the business implications; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; marketing Steven Spielberg, George Lucas […]
A new version of RSS aggregator FeedDemon was released on Friday which I think is an essential upgrade if you’re an existing user. While new version 2.7 does include quite a few bug fixes and improvements to some functionality, according […]
This PC Pro magazine cover-double of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates caught my eye the other day. It’s the June 2008 edition of the magazine, just out. Two different covers but exactly the same content in each version. Each contains an […]
“Regret the error” is a phrase that appears daily in newspapers around the world – the standard admission that something has gone terribly wrong in the reporting, editing or printing of an article. This brief notice is generally accompanied by […]
Content summary: Upcoming FIR Interviews and FIR Live call-in shows; discussion: podcast advertising and different approaches; Dan York reports on the disconnects when buying a new home, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; new online tool to measure […]