Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Bad PR Pitches: The Final Straw

My blog has been quiet for the last week or so thanks to a trip to Hong Kong (which I enjoyed immensely), and imagine my reaction when I got home and found mutiple emails that just offended my senses. The gist usually is something like this:

Hello,

Our awesome event [insert name of event] has secured awesome speaker [insert name of speaker] to be at said event on this awesome date [insert date] together with other awesome speaker such as [name drop #1], [name drop #2] and [name drop #3]

Attached is the press release and a photograph of the awesome speaker. Please tell the world about it on your blog

Really? Dear PR person on the other end of the email, if you had such a request, would you do anything to act on it?

Borrowing a little from Jeremy Woolf’s blogpost, Dear spammers, can we have our social media back?, I’ve decided to come up with a few “rules” for my blog:

1) The pitch had better be relevant to me, my blog, and my readers. I’ll leave you to decipher what that means.
2) The pitch should not include a press release. A social media release or a link to graphs/videos is fine.
3) Provide a beneficial call to action. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m not your news channel. If you think said awesome person is so interesting, offer me a chance to meet him or her over lunch or an invitation to the event  so I can blog about how awesome I thought the person was after that.

I’m going to put it as plainly as I can: such emails are spam. And following this blog post, I will mark all emails as such and forward the email to whoever the contact person is on the company webpage (hopefully the CEO) and explain why it offends me. I’m also giving serious thought to starting a PR blacklist wiki. Sure I might miss out on some really relevant piece of news months down the line, but that is a price I’m gladly willing to pay.

Tags: bad pr, bad pr pitches, blacklist pr, call to action, final straw, hong kong, mutually beneficial relationship, news channel, press release, social media release, spam

Posted in Poor Practices, blogger outreach, education, social media | 5 Comments »

Building A Web Presence: Works For Cosi Cafe

One of my favourite franchises in New York is Cosi Cafe, and I spent quite a bit of time at their outlets while I was there. One thing Cosi does well is maintaining a good web presence.

Their website is divided into the US States, with individual addresses of the outlets listed. This means one can enter it on Google Maps and find it fairly easily. Or, even easier, typing “Cosi Cafe, New York” in the Google Maps search bar turns up the various locations in Manhattan, so all you have to do is choose the one closest to you.

What really blew me away was when I was trying to find this one particular Cosi Cafe outlet that I particularly liked. I didn’t remember anything about it, other than it was near the Natural History Museum. I had walked out a different exit last December and it was dark, so I randomly walked in one direction and stumbled upon the place. So I did Google Map search and looked a a couple which were rather close to the Museum, and chose Google’s Street View and saw this

Maybe you can’t see it from the image, but it’s next to a hair salon called “Curl Up And Dye”, which I remember from my previous trip (how do you forget a name like that?).

The lesson here? In a place like Manhattan, or Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or Singapore, where choice is endless, you may have people like me who adore your brand, or just a random tourist searching for “coffee in New York” or “shoes in Hong Kong”.

Unlike Kingston, you can’t afford to not be reaching out on the web with a website, a blog, a Facebook account, pictures, videos and other user-generated content, because people will be searching for your vertical, and if they can’t find you, you can bet they’ll find your competitor instead.

Tags: cosi cafe, curl up and dye, google maps, google street view, hong kong, manhattan, natural history museum new york, new york, Singapore, tokyo

Posted in social media | No Comments »