Another long tail. HA!
Bloggers with little or no access to PR folks — here’s your chance. Chris Anderson, EIC of Wired, is pissed off at a bunch of marketing folks who keep bombarding him with emails that have little if anything to do with his day-to-day job as “guy who thinks up overwrought memes.” As payback, he trapped a bunch of releases and banned their senders and posted their email addresses on his blog. How can you use this to your advantage? Mass email these folks and tell them about your blog. You’ll either get silence or they’ll stick you on their PR list just to be done with you. One man’s trash is another man’s comfortably full inbox.
Sorry PR people: you’re blocked [TheLongTail]
Excellent point!
I’m not convinced Chris should have published the addresses; Wired doesn’t publish theirs and he doesn’t include a general “if you want to contact Wired editors instead of me” note on his about page.
But, the deed is done so perhaps some bloggers can benefit.
I work in tech PR and I try to get pitches to the most appropriate contacts at all times. That being said, sometimes editors/bloggers will end up on a mailing list as a result of a one-time product request, which starts the whole cycle. If a new PR folk joins an existing team and pitches that media list they may never know that they pitched the inappropriate contact.
I’m not defending these PR people, but it would be more helpful for Chris to quickly respond and say, “please take me off of your list,” or “so-and-so would be the more appropriate contact.”
In the meantime, I do advise PR people to read the publications/blogs they pitch to save everyone time in the long run…