Post 8, 2009. PR “Truthiness”

March 19, 2009 in P-aaaaargh!, Worst Pitch Ever?, Worst practise

When I practised PR, there was often a certain amount of truthiness involved in the way I communicated with media.
I hope it was pretty harmless, because what I was trying to do was to explain to media how an event, issue or product could become a story for them, even though I knew the content [...]

Post 57:08 An old favorite returns and more social media musing

August 11, 2008 in Freelance life, P-aaaaargh!, Web 2.0, Worst Pitch Ever?, Worst practise, social networking

Twice in the last week PRs have sent me material in emails with several others cc’ed or included in the To field.
In one case more than 100 email addresses were there to be harvested.
To me this is the most basic breach of email etiquette (and privacy!) imaginable and quite astounding in this day and age, [...]

Post 48:08 Plurk followup – Back to the (P word) future

June 5, 2008 in Web 2.0, Worst Pitch Ever?

Well I now quite like Plurk, so I suppose you can add hypocrite to the other adjectives that can successfully be applied to me.
The main reasons I like it more are:

It has some nice bits Twitter does not
I have figured out how to get Plurks into Twitter.

The second point, however, makes me wonder if the [...]

Post 44:08 PR-ing bloggers vs. grass roots sponsorship (With an update!)

May 22, 2008 in Bicycles, P-aaaaargh!, Worst Pitch Ever?

I’ve known for a while that PRs target bloggers.
Now I have seen it at work and reaction to it among members of the bicycle club of which I am a member.
One of the members of the club runs a blog that mentions his cycling exploits, and received an email from a PR to this effect:
“ [...]

Post 43:08 One of the weirdest PR tactics I have ever encountered

May 19, 2008 in P-aaaaargh!, Worst Pitch Ever?, Worst practise

I received a mail last week from a vendor, which let me know that in the near future it will release a preview of a soon-to-be-released product.
The email offered me the chance to register to be told when the preview of the product will become available.
And that was it. Links in the mail sent me [...]

Post 39:08 What’s the story?

May 6, 2008 in P-aaaaargh!, Web 2.0, Work, Worst Pitch Ever?, Worst practise

I keep having weird exchanges with PRs at the moment.
They start like this:
PR: Would you like to interview my client, who sells [insert category of product] and want to talk about why it is terribly important in the context of some big meme [like green IT].
My reply is nearly always:
Why is this terribly important?
To which [...]

Post 30:08 The new logo was a waste of time after all (for the marketing industry, anyway)

March 26, 2008 in Freelance life, P-aaaaargh!, Worst Pitch Ever?

Check out Post 27:08.
I did indeed do it as a phoner and am happy that I did.
It turns out there was never any intention to discuss news.
The main theme of the phoner was that virtualisation creates backup problems. The discussion of the new logo revealed two interesting nuggetoids, the first being that it took 18 [...]

Post 27:08 New logos

March 17, 2008 in Freelance life, P-aaaaargh!, Work, Worst Pitch Ever?

I was invited to an event last week at which the vendor in question has announced it will unveil its new logo.
That’s right. A new logo. (A few weeks after it was unveiled in the USA)
The company’s name begins with “N”. The new logo is a big “N”.
Apparently the event will also explain why [...]

Post 26:08 Whys Up

March 13, 2008 in Freelance life, P-aaaaargh!, Work, Worst Pitch Ever?

I did an interview yesterday that lasted six minutes.
The brevity is explained by the fact that I had heard all of the interviewee’s arguments before, from others.
That’s not unusual for me these days, because so many interviews seem to me to have very little “why” to them.
Let me explain.
Journalism 101 says that journalism is all [...]

Post 22:08 Astoundingly bad PR

February 27, 2008 in P-aaaaargh!, Vendors I have met, Work, Worst Pitch Ever?, Worst practise

Earlier this week a PR company offered me an interview with their client, which is about to release a very fast, very powerful and somewhat iconic new computer and an accompanying storage system.
Here’s my reply to the PR:

“I’m as interested in the storage device as I am in the mainframe, so if the spokesperson can [...]