At the cost of breaking away from my usual techy write ups, here’s a lone exception that stems out of desperation.

I am admitting that there indeed are dozens of very good Public Relations (PR) people in the business of media. These know better than to make the mistakes that others make and continue making. Remember that I am not trying to tar all PR professionals with this brush, but unfortunately, there are still a stinking lot of PR people who JUST DONT UNDERSTAND or rather choose to ignore your directions.

There are days when we (read Journalists) try to remind them to stop spamming us with stuff we know will never be written about and is absolute crap to begin with. Of course, that never works, because the real problem is that the PR folks who spam us with stuff we would never write about clearly don not bother reading the newspaper/website/magazine or whatever that is touted as media (else they would know that we will never write the lame press release they insist upon). On the other hand, if they are not spamming your mailbox then these fellas would be spamming your mobile phone’s inbox or answering machine or whichever machine you divert their calls to. A direct indication of a hectic week full of conferences and meetings is laid out before your eyes, thanks to the overflowing emails and voicemails that read - “We request the pleasure of your company Next Week at BlahBlah Conference…You would meet with ABC company because they have an awesome new business plan up their sleeves or they will talk numbers.”

Once again, these are rarely involving companies or products we’d write about — and often are at conferences we have no intention of attending. Still, it seems that one PR person has taken this to the next level. Rather than just spamming random bloggers about some company appearing at the Spring VON show, this PR person spammed Jeff Pulver, the founder, creator, organizer and “master of ceremonies” of VON to ask if he was going to be attending and if s/he could schedule a briefing with the company. It’s one thing to be so clueless not to know the audience of who you’re pitching. It’s another not to do the basic research to know if they’re actually going to be attending a certain conference. However, not recognizing the organizer of the event you’re attending and pitching at — and sending him a generic boilerplate “hope your attending/schedule a briefing” email is pretty inexcusable. While Jeff doesn’t reveal the name of the PR firm or the company it’s representing, he might want to alert the company that it’s wasting a lot of money on its PR bill.

PS: Thanks Prasad, for the mucho-needed inspiration to rekindle my blogging.