Post 76: Worst pitch ever - Asiarelease.com and how to ruin your reputation

August 24, 2007 in Freelance life, P-aaaaargh!, Work, Worst Pitch Ever?, Worst practise

Over the last few days, I and several other Australian IT journalists have started to receive media releases from a company called asiarelease.com.

This company has been distributing press releases with headlines such as ‘Cisco and Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport to Deliver Advanced Networking Skills’ to a wide variety of Australian IT media. The releases have almost zero relevance to Australian audiences. One described a new implementation of something in Hong Kong.

The company has been completely indiscriminating.

I have spoken with consumer tech journalists who have received this stuff and they are grumpy because this stuff has NO relevance to their work at all! Worse still, none of us asked to participate in this ’service’.

If there’s a way for these releases to escape being defined as Spam, I cannot see it.

And from my point of view, the vendors that use this service (and it is not just Cisco) really need to wake up to themselves and understand that they are doing their reputations harm.

For example, some of the releases I have received have been from companies that I had not previously heard of.

So my first impression of those companies is that they are spammers who are so inconsiderate they will rob me of time and computing resources before they even introduce themselves to me.

What chance do they have of successfully pitching to me in future after that start?

Is that really what public relations is about? And why are vendors still inclined to use such crude services when far better tools are available and PR constantly preaches that it is more sophisticated than these tactics suggest?

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