Sometimes, the panic sets in just as you’ve hit the ‘send’ button. But there are occasions when it sets in round about the time you realise that your mis-sent efforts have made it to not only a raft of individuals you’d rather didn’t see your mistake, but several news sites as well as a whole world of Tweets by PRs revelling in a little schadenfreude.
The email in question was sent by an accounts manager at Pulse Communications in Sydney, inviting leading Australian foodies to write a blog post about how great Fancy Feast cat food is, and why it deserves its own stand at Australia’s Good Food and Wine Show. Oops.
A particularly withering reply was sent from an editor at The Weekend Australian, detailing his delight at his “big opportunity to get out of journalism”, and asking for details on the money he’d receive for “trashing his entire career”.
Pulse has been forced to backtrack, claiming (some say unsuccessfully) that they weren’t offering cash for comment, and that the email was meant for freelancers, asking for copy for the Pulse blog and the cat food’s website.
Whilst the PR industry does, of course, need to be embracing social media, it also needs to learn how to do so. The case provides a sterling example of how not to.
It doesn’t take very long to find posts in which people grumble about marketing and PR types sending emails that ask for their product to be featured. And it’s understandable. An email I received referring to a personal blog a week or so ago ran:
Hi there,Hope you don’t mind me getting in touch. I work for Suchandsuch Media, and we’re making sure that Scottish sites know about the latest viral from Irn Bru. It’s high school musical, but with a Scottish twist.
You can find the video here…
We’re also looking for sites to run the video on a commercial basis…
Conceivably, it’d be an interesting piece of footage (I don’t know, I didn’t watch it). But (ignoring for a moment that fact that a ‘viral’ is not something thought up by creative types – a piece of footage becomes viral when it’s so popular it’s sent from person to person. A bit like a virus. Funny, that) I’m not Scottish, neither is my blog, and I’m pretty certain I’ve never mentioned Irn Bru. I’ve also never posted anything in the form of video content, and my blog features no advertising. The relevance of the sender’s email escapes me, as it does regarding the one she sent a couple of days later, following up on my “interest”.
Ditto those sent asking whether I would like to do “an unbiased review (in English language [just as well, as my Swahili’s a bit rusty these days]) of our Asian furniture site on your blog” or linking to a site that sells sex toys. As it happens, I’d like to do neither.
As put by one blogger: asking me to promote something that has absolutely no relevance to any of the things I blog about is like asking an untrained monkey to sing a Lady GaGa song: utterly pointless, unlikely to happen and does no favours for anyone involved.
The key is fairly straightforward: approach selling-in to social media the same way as to print. There’s no point calling the Daily Star with a nuanced and subtle story about the changes proposed to a Bill going through Parliament, just as you probably wouldn’t call The Daily Telegraph with a picture story if the photo’s of a girl in a barely-there bikini on the back of a motorbike.
It’s a simple theory, but once that works: whether it’s new media or old, know your audience. And think twice before you hit ‘send’.
