There was a saying in the pre-Internet days of the media: “Don’t argue with people who buy ink by the barrel.” The same holds true today in the Internet era: don’t argue with bloggers who have unlimited bandwidth. They will always win.
Today’s example comes from Valleywag, the gossip site about Silicon Valley. Seems a clueless PR person (who I won’t name out of sheer kindness) sent an email pitch to Valleywag about her client’s “customized software solutions.” First of all, it was a prime example of PR spam, since there was zero chance that Valleywag would consider a story about her client.
But worse — much worse — is that she somehow sent Valleywag a draft pitch that showed the changes she had made to her template, swapping out the journalist’s name, the client name, even another PR person’s name for hers. You can see this sorry artifact here.
Valleywag, which traffics in snarky, mean and questionable information, didn’t waste any time posting this misbegotten pitch. Ouch.
Then, to make matters even worse, our clueless PR person sent Valleywag a ‘cease and desist’ email threatening legal action if Valleywag didn’t remove her pitch from their site. I’m not sure what legal argument she imagines she had for making the request. Valleywag posted that email too.
Now, in today’s crazy world, maybe this was all premeditated. After all, here we are talking about it on the Catching Flack blog. Maybe the whole thing was a brilliant way to get attention for her client. But I doubt it.
Word to the wise: emails can be posted to the Internet in a heartbeat. Think about that before you hit the send button.
No comments:
Post a Comment