how to show you're really clueless about blogging as a marketing tool

Michael Gartenberg | August 29, 2005, 04:03 PM

I've talked about the role of PR folks and bloggers before. Yes, blogging means that PR folks will reach out to you and that's not a bad thing per se. But what about when marketing folks try and use the very medium of blogging and really get it wrong? Well, they usually are worse off then were before.

Case in point, I get an email from a PR flack who describes her understanding of bloggers and their role as new influencers. She's going to put the word out to the key influencers and let the market act as the ultimate PR machine. Cool, so far. Except that she's pitching me on a salesforce automation app. Now I cover a lot of things but SFA isn't one of them. What makes this so bad is that it's not just a misdirected marketing pitch in my inbox. It's someone who's claiming to understand the new role of bloggers and ends showing me he doesn't understand it at all. Now in my younger days, I might have reprinted the email here and held this poor lady up to public shame. That would have immediately shifted her client's position in the marketplace. The conversation gets shifted and we're no longer talking about how cool her client's stuff is, we're talking about how clueless this PR lady is. I repeat, get this stuff wrong and you're not at zero. You're negative and it takes ten times the efforts to recover.

Note to the clueless PR gal, give me a call and we can talk about how to do this the right way.