One of the motivating notions of the blogging movement is the idea that blogs put individuals — including business executives — directly in touch with one another, bypassing layers of middle-people. That’s the idea, anyway. Or you can hire a PR person to send email to bloggers saying that you “read their blogs regularly” and “wonder if they’d be open” to you “posting an opinion.”
Both Mitch Kapor of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe — along with who knows how many other bloggers (not me, though!) — were recently on the receiving end of such an email. Clueless PR efforts are an ineradicable fact of life, and pointing out that said executive would have served himself far more effectively by popping these bloggers a quick email of his own — or posting comments on their sites himself — isn’t going to change the entrenched business practice of “have my secretary/PR person/other flunky do it for me.”
What’s most amusing about this incident is that Kapor, in a gentlemanly way, hid the identity of both the executive and the PR firm in question — but others in the comments to his post took key phrases from the PR letter and used Google to nail down exactly who exec in question seems to be.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.