Stupid PR Tricks, Part 4

Stupidity

from the two-for-one! dept

Here’s the latest in our, irregular, but ongoing discussion of PR people not understanding blogs. First, we had PR people hired by companies to pitch them, but pretending to be totally unconnected to the companies they were bugging us about. Second, we had PR people submitting press releases when we clearly told them not to — and, even worse, submitting press releases about things we would obviously never write about (something you would know if you looked at the site for more than, say, five seconds). Next, we had the PR spammer who emailed out 11 press releases, all written in capital letters, and had no return address on the emails. Today, yet another PR person who can’t be bothered to read the site emailed us a press release this morning (again on a story we would never come close to posting — no, we don’t care that the tiny company you represent got named to some industry list). This time, however, the PR person had taken a word document with an old press release and just dumped in the new stuff while thinking she had deleted the old. She then let Word “save as HTML” and sent out the press release as an email. Unfortunately for her, I don’t let my email client display HTML email, so what I got was nearly unreadable — but just readable enough to note that when Word saves in HTML, apparently it includes all the changes. So from what I could see, I have a “mash up” of two press releases, complete with random strike-throughs and insertions, showing all of the edits made on the existing press release. So, for example, I can see that whereas they originally described the company’s solution as “unique,” that was later crossed out. Not that I would be writing about this announcement anyway, but now I’m left wondering what happened that this company’s product is no longer “unique.”