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?
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.
So Dorothy and I were speaking at Ad:Tech Asia yesterday at a youth panel, and there was much discussion at the panel, on Twitter and online about what was said. We decided a quick episode of GennY would be a great way to talk about our thoughts after the panel. You can check out this blog post with lots of details with what was said at the panel.
The show notes
00:00 – Daryl and Dorothy start us off, this is focused on the fallout after the Ad:Tech youth panel, 2009
00:27 – First point: Why this obssession with the distinction between “new” and “traditional” media?
01:55 – Daryl mentions that the tools are all the same and references Brian’s (@litford)’s comments in GennY #4 about the same tools having different usages, with different results. (GennY Podcast episode 004 – 22:34)
02:15 – Dorothy mentions that consistency across the different platforms is the key
02:55 – Is it about distinguishing the differences between them, or about how they can work together?
03:11 – Who do “influencers” really have to be?
05:34 – Down with “faceless” corporations on social media channels!! It’s impersonal and we can’t relate
06:55 – How about spokespeople from companies being the “faces” online?
07:44 – There are “stages” and “levels” in social media and the difficulty ramps up at each stage
08:17 – Perhaps co-ownership is the way to go. As long as there is someone available to listen
09:35 – Final point: Are youth really that different?
10:00 – Do older generations remember banner ads or TV ads?
10:18 – Marketers don’t like to hear that Gen Y doesn’t want to hear from “faceless” corporations, but isn’t it the same as receiving a telemarketer phone call or junk mail asking to sign up for a new credit card?
10:53 – Do the older generations go on websites and think “Wow this banner ad rocks I want to click on it”? Because if they don’t, why do they think we will?
11:10 – At the end of the day, would you be interested/excited about the ad if you were a consumer?
11:40 – Why would you do selective focus groups who may not even be your target group, when you could do it online with your fans and get fast feedback?
Google Operating System posted this earlier this week about yet another aggregator called Readburner, which simply tallies up what’s most shared on Google Reader, and publishes them on it’s website. I’ve already subscribed to the feed, and so far, I like what I’m getting.
If Digg and Del.icio.us are a little to complicated and/or daunting for you (as I must admit, Del.icio.us still is for me), then this will probably be perfect.
And no, you can probably skip Technorati entirely, because not only it is really chaotic to navigate, but according to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, 99% of pings on Technorati are spam. Observing the amount of spam pingbacks I’ve been getting on this very tiny blog alone, I’m inclined to agree. This, coupled with the fact that Technorati’s layout needs some serious work, definitely would suggest that you give it a miss, at least for now. There are other, easier ways to get into the whole social media scene, for observer and participant alike.
