Posts tagged ‘PR’
the letters we sometimes wish we could send
Re-reading Victoria Routledge’s chick-lit debut Friends Like These, I found the most brilliant letter from the heroine PR exec to her client:
Dear Miranda,
I am delighted to enclose the proof of your Spring/Summer promo brochure. We are thrilled with the finished version and hope you will love it as much as we do. Everyone here at Dunleary & Bright is sure that this will be the breakthrough season for Detritus and that this dynamic promo will be the clinching factor in securing excellent magazine and TV coverage.
I would be amazed if you could be bothered to cast your eye over this proof and let me have any of the myriad and pointless corrections you might like to make. I will need to pass this on to the printers by August 31st, so I won’t expect to get any indication from your office that you have actually received this until it is far too late to do anything, that is to say, late September.
When your directionless and inarticulate PA does get round to it, I will, of course be here on my direct line for personal abuse and blame-apportioning. Please do contact me if there are any further questions I can answer, or more likely, if you require the whole thing explained to you, with diagrams.
All best wishes, Rachel Sanderson, Dunleary & Bright
Are Putin’s PR people taking the p*ss?
This weekend’s photos of former Russian president Vladimir Putin stroking his new tiger cub followed hot on the heels on the release of his ‘Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin’ DVD. Add in the recent ‘macho man shirtless while fishing/hunting’ photocalls and I can only assume that his PR advisors have been partaking a little too enthusiastically of Russia’s famous vodka.
I can imagine the scene, lots of suited men and bouffant haired women sitting around a board room table, all the wrong side of tipsy going “I’ve got it! We’ll give him a tiger cub!” and everyone else drunkenly agreeing what a fantastic idea it is…
Note to PR execs – my blog is not free advertorial and it would help if you actually bothered to read it
I’ve obviously arrived (in blogosphere terms) as emails have started turning up from PR agencies looking for coverage.
Today’s missive is a classic case of how-not-to-do-it:
• They left a comment on my ‘about’ page rather than sending me an email as per the helpful ‘contact me’ box on the right
• Their comment read ‘could you please send me a contact as we would like to put [major cool brand event this Summer] on your site’
• So I emailed back asking for a bit more information and the response was ‘I understand that you covered it last year?’
• Well, I mentioned the event in passing while pointing out that I thought it’s strategy was flawed, but that’s hardly the same thing…
God help a) the client who is paying for this bad t’interweb karma and b) any PR agency who doesn’t understand bloggers. Unlike tame journos, we bite back.
