Having spent three weeks in my summer house in July, I had to wade through hundreds of emails when I returned back to civilization. One of them was from one of largest companies in Sweden, I will spare you which one because I am a friend of their head of PR. I believe it is the first time I have been approached by the communications department of a large Swedish company in my role as a blogger. I’m glad that public relations professionals are aware that bloggers are influential and potentially a target for PR pitches. But when it is performed in such a clueless way, I’m baffled.
First of all, the PR person hasn’t read my blog. If she had, she would know that I never ever write about stuff from her company’s industry. Is it really so hard to figure out that I blog about PR and media? It is in the headline. I do not blog about your products.
Second, if you are in the process of sending out a mass mailing, please make sure that I don’t feel like I’m on the receiving end of a spam attack. The email I got had obviously been forwarded at least once, so it had the “>” sign before every line, and the second half of the first sentence had apparently been edited, because it had a different color than all the other lines, at least in my email program. Translated:
> Hello,
>
> You receive this email because you are one of the most frequently read and
noticed blogs in Sweden.
>
> We wonder if you are interested in subscribing to press releases from XYZ?
Now, I am not trying to be mean, rather show that if you are pitching bloggers, you need even more finesse and fingerspitzgefühl than if you are pitching journalists. Not the other way around because bloggers will tell everyone that you’re making a mistake. Besides, it would have been smarter to let people sign up to press release subscriptions via the online press room or via RSS, but of course you can’t.