Clueless At Conde Nast
These days, ErosBlog gets a lot of PR emails, from folks with mainstream publications (whether still printed on dead trees expensively coated in glossy clay, or migrating rapidly from that sinking ship onto the cheaper high ground of the virtual internets).
There’s a few fundamental best practices for internet PR professionals. Mostly, they seem unaware of them.
One fairly basic politeness (that you’d think their mommas would have taught them) is to make an introduction. A PR professional ought to introduce himself or herself and say who they represent. They almost never do this; they just breezily offer up the link they are trying to promote and sign off with “Julie” or “Bob” like you are their close friend who never heard of them before.
This is a professional mistake, because the line between “internet PR professional” and “spammer” is dangerously thin. The only sure way to avoid crossing it is to actually forge a relationship with the people you’re marketing to. And relationships, as everybody should know who ever had a momma, start with an introduction. In meatspace, you walk up, offer your hand to shake, and say, “Hi, I’m Roger Eurace, I do PR for a couple of magazines and I like your blog, I think we’ve got some common interests.” In email, you can’t shake hands, but that first line “I’m Hugh Gepenies from Big Richard Magazine, and [eight words making it clear this is not a form letter sent to dozens of people]” is absolutely essential.
Why? Because if you open with your spam-ish marketing message, and it’s not individually tailored to the recipient, it’s a dead give-away that you likely did spam the same email to dozens or hundreds of people. And that makes you a spammer, and a spammer is a type of thief (thief of attention, thief of time, thief of computer resources).
Worse yet, by not introducing yourself as a marketing professional, and by breezily signing your first name as if the recipient of the email already knows you, you convey the impression that you’re hoping to pretend to be a friend, or another blogger. That’s petty fraud, or would be if it weren’t so annoyingly, transparently obvious.
No organization who hires a PR professional wants their brand associated with petty thievery and fraud. But alleged PR professionals often don’t understand internet values, so they don’t understand that their small deceits and attempted frauds work at cross purposes to their primary goal of getting positive internet attention.
Finally, a true PR professional doesn’t waste time trying to promote something that’s likely to actively annoy the target of the contact. Which means, spammy bulk mailings become impossible; the PR person actually has to read the blogs he or she is marketing to. That’s good, because spamming a blogger with a link that’s likely to annoy said blogger is more likely to get you mocked than it is to get a link to the client’s website.
Enter Stephanie.
This morning I get this email:
> Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:48:52
> Subject: ‘Flirting with Disaster’ in DETAILS
The subject line alone trips my bullshit filters. The word “disaster” suggests one of those breathless mainstream “the dangers of dating” articles — as a pro-sex sort of publication, Eros Blog doesn’t focus much on sexual disaster, especially when it’s portrayed (as it too often is) as the inevitable consequence of unzipping your zipper. Moving on:
> From: Stephanie Kim {Stephanie_Kim@condenast.com}
> To: bacchus@erosblog.com
Ayup. Corporate marketing. Conde Nast has some good titles, I’m still reading.
> Good Morning-
>
> Have you ever encouraged your significant other to explore their
> bi-curiosity?
Gosh, that’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not totally beyond the pale; it’s fair coming from a personal friend, or somebody who is on my blogroll that I’ve exchanged emails with before. But from a stranger?
Note the utter lack of an introduction. Note also there’s nothing in this intro that would have prevented mass-mailing this email to a dozen or a thousand or ten million other bloggers.
Next we get to the meat-like substance in the can of spam:
> In the January/February issue of DETAILS, we share the surprising
> and unintentional consequences.
>
> http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_7783
Right ho, and you just proved you’ve never read ErosBlog. Spammer.
The consequences of “encouraging your significant other to explore their bi-curiousity” are deeply unpredictable. From an upside of endless wild three-ways to a downside of relationship-crushing rejection, you just never know until you try. If any of the possible outcomes are surprising, you weren’t being a clear-eyed sexual grown-up when you decided to take a whack at the bee-hive shaped pinata.
But we saw the “Flirting with Disaster” title, didn’t we? So we already know that this is a standard main-stream magazine “ZOMG, sexual adventurousness is dangerous” waste of time. Another in a long line of sex-negative propaganda pieces, all of which exist to prove that if you step out of your grey-flannel suit, you’re a doomed sinner who will surely suffer your just desserts of heartbreak, divorce, and damnation.
At this point the only thing we don’t know is how deep in the water this particular journalistic failboat will be.
Remind me again, why anybody who reads ErosBlog would think we might want to link favorably to an article talking about the manifest and obvious dangers of sexual openness and adventurousness?
Back to Stephanie, who (it turns out) has been winding up for a bit of fatuous condescension:
> Please be sure to link to our site should you post anything.
And you be sure to put covers on them magazines, it would sure be bad if they were flappin’ around on the news stands and nobody knew what their titles were!
Thanks for telling me how to do my job, lady. Thanks a bunch. I’ve been blogging since 2003 — how long have you been marketing dead tree magazines on the internet?
> Thank you for your consideration!
>
> Best,
>
> Stephanie
She might have rescued herself, from mockery if not from spammer status or mission failure, if she’d bothered to add a second line to her signature, something like “PR Assistant, Conde Nast Magazines”. But no, she’s come this far hoping I won’t think too hard about who she is, and she’s now trying to slide away from the contact without me ever noticing that she’s never said.
Enough about Stephanie. How full of fail is her proffered link?
Well, first of all, it’s important to remember that print magazines have lots of pages, so they can sell lots of ad space. And so, when they migrate to the web, they tend to take tiny little nine-paragraph articles and split them up across three different web “pages” to generate a bogus high volume of “page views”. It’s an annoying industry standard. Some magazines do this in print, too, splitting articles up with lots of jumps so you’ll have to page through the mag a lot of times. Recreating that physical pain in electronic form is just one of the many ways that the fading print dinosaurs are failing to adapt, and one of the biggest reasons why it’s a rare print magazine website that’s worth a bucket of warm spit.
Let’s move on to content. Remember the carefully gender-neutral hook in Stephanie’s email? “Have you ever encouraged your significant other to explore their bi-curiosity?” Well, ladies, have you?
Sorry, that was bait and switch. Stephanie has apparently heard of bi-curious men, but the reader of the article she’s promoting never will. The subheader under the “Flirting With Disaster” headline makes that clear: “Want your girlfriend to try a little sapphic action? Be careful what you wish for.”
There’s not a single word in the article about bi-curious men. “sapphic action” (lack of capital letter in original) sets the tone. Here’s a little word cloud of lovely phrases from the article:
“sapphic action” “conjugal bed” “Owen’s wife dropped the pink bomb” “lesbian awakening” “lesbian-obsessed guy” “do a shot of the Tila Tequila punch” “give girl-on-girl a try” “walk on the wild side” “Sapphic-themed sex” “chick-on-chick action”
I look at these things so you don’t have to. Sorry, Stephanie, it’s not worth a link.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=2852
Bah, I did it again! I am not liking the newer WordPress interfaces with their ajax-gearsy way of vanishing things forever the instant you press the wrong button.
Pal, I deleted your comment with the “bucket of warm spit fetishes” joke in it, by accident. I’m sorry.
Thank you for sharing this article. It’s kind of sad how so many people fail to notice the obvious.
The icing on your article was the Fail images. That brought a big smile to my face!
Spot on, as ever, Bacchus. My inbox is full of emails like the one detailed above, but I just grit my teeth and delete them. So it’s nice to see you deconstruct the spam approach and highlight the stupidity of the PRs who send them. Will they ever learn? I doubt it.
I got the same email. I get similar emails at the rate of maybe 100/month. And those are the ones that make it into my inbox.
I mark them as “spam” and send them on their merry way. Do you mark them as spam too? Or just delete them?
I worry that one of these days I’ll miss something truly important from someone I’ve marked as spam, like: “We’ll give you $50,000 if you’ll write a 9-paragraph piece for our dead tree magazine. Probably not likely, eh?
laugh…I was totally serious… oh wait.
Spam is one of those things we are going to have to deal with. When I say ‘we’, I mean the collective ‘whateverness’ of netspace. I’m pretty sure we’d all agree that any one gv’t intervention would not only be morally vacant, but maybe downright heading toward evil and be impossible to maintain.
A solution, in some kind of denial software or negative sanctioning via the mail routing would have to be enforced by our collective dollars for the software and us talking up the social depravity that it is.
I’m trying to remember some kind of precedence from history, but I can’t quite. During the 19th century patent medicine had the same flighty cache, but it was rubbed out by large-scale government intervention.
Cory Doctorow wrote a short story called “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” which deals with the issues of the web became ultimately self governed. I won’t link here, I don’t know if that would be cool Bacchus? But I hope you don’t mind me mentioning the title. It does provoke some meditation on responsibility for what we have created.
Pal, Google should do the trick for folks, although a Cory link will generally make it through moderation.
This isn’t really about spam for me, I deal with hundreds of spams a day and it doesn’t get under my skin. This is about someone who ought to be sending real email if she wants to do her job right, but who’s sending spam because it’s easier and she doesn’t understand how much damage she’s doing to the brand she’s supposed to be promoting.
AAG, some smart blogger (I’ve forgotten which) has a term for the emails that are half-way between spam and real email — he calls ’em “bacn” (like bacon). It’s not smart to filter these *out*, because they have the *potential* to be something you want to see (as in your dream of the fat writing offer). I consider genuine PR mails (ones that are sent to me, not to a long list of “sex bloggers”) to be bacn — I’d like to see them, some of them are useful, but I don’t want to devote much time to them because they are 99% useless.
Generally I don’t spend the time to really *study* these to see if they should be flagged spam. If they have the same structure as mails that might be useful, I’m loathe to train my Bayesian spam filter to reject them. But I do notice, and despise, the pointless mass mailings. Real PR these days is individual and personal, and it’s not an easy job, I’d never call somebody out for doing that job in a professional, one-to-one way, even if it does sometimes inconvenience me.
What was that famous line about PRs and journalists, and their relationship being that of a dog and a lamp post? It bothers me that the line between the two is now so blurred, it bothers me even more that once reputable media outlets should commit such blunders while being seemingly lax with their corporate communication strategy (assuming they have one?). Perhaps Stephanie is just an intern doing a day’s work experience…? This reminds me of the e-mails I got about exchanging links with light fitting companies in the US. The fit between my blog and their services was nil.
Ariel, several times when I have complained (to supposedly reputable companies) about PR activities that were even more blatantly spam than this email, I’ve gotten the same answer as your supposition: “Oh, that was an intern, she didn’t know any better, we’ll talk to her.” After a while, one grows cynical of that claim.
This situation is not quite as bad as your light fittings example, inasmuch as the topic of Stephanie’s spam was an article on a topic that is within the universe of topics that ErosBlog covers. The problem — which would be forgivable in the context of a one-to-one PR contact — is that the article is so laughably bad, and because of its stereotyping and 1950s mock-jockularity so unsuitable for ErosBlog coverage, that its promotion to me served as extra evidence that the person sending the link was not any sort of ErosBlog reader, despite their (poorly executed) attempt to conform to the style a reader might use in suggesting a link.
Great dissection.
For a small (ie. me and my wife) we’ve racked up a pretty impressive list of press-mentions, and on more than one occasion (mostly at trade shows) we’ve been asked who does our PR. When I respond “I do” people from larger companies are very nearly incredulous. They simply can’t understand how the “PR footprint” of Comstock Films can be the result of on person’s part-time efforts (in addition to PR I actually have to make the films too!)
Your analysis of Conde Nast’s missteps is pretty much a case-study in reverse of how I (try to) work. If you didn’t have such an anti-BS temperament, you could probably make a lot of money as an internet/blog PR consultant ;-)
Tony, you’ve always done excellent PR, with never a hint of spam.
It’s funny you should mention the consultant angle; for as long as I have been in this business, I’ve caught myself writing extremely detailed things (from rants to helpful emails) in connection with people who “don’t get it” about the internets. And a fair few of those times, I’ve thought to myself “I should be getting paid for this — this is essentially what a consultant does, only he’s getting paid for it and has to be more professional.” But yeah, I’d probably have to put on a suit, and I’d definitely have to re-learn how to smile and nod while listening to arrant nonsense. I spent six or seven years wearing a tie, I know how it’s done, but “not eager to go there” doesn’t fully characterize my sentiments in that regard.
In a odd way, bad PR efforts make my job both harder and easier. Harder because the overall signal to noise ratio is worse, and that makes cutting through harder, especially by e-mail. Easier, because if you can cut through and if you’ve done your home work (i.e. figuring out what’s in it for the person you’re asking for a favor) you easily separate yourself from the noise.
One of the problems with places like Conde Nast is they’re staffed (both inside the company and their agents) with people who are somewhat (to put it mildly) star-struck by the profile of the company they work for, and presume that everyone else will be as well.
In fact, there is a pretty easily ID’d, New York centric media echo chamber, made up largely of young, profile obsessed people. If “exposure” is what you seek, it’s a good circle to break into. But exposure is not the same thing as commerce. Most of these folks figure this out in their mid-thirties and move on to less glamourous but better paying jobs.
@tony et al.
this thread is making me think of a book title I perused by at the local uni library. It was something about using applied anthropology among PR and advertising groups to nullify that above factor of star struckedness, or groupthink or whatever. I never picked it up, but it seemed like a good idea. The principle seems to be that you use someone to force a shift in perception, you back it up using things your audience is comfortable with, while forcing them out of their comfort zone. I may be inferring too much from just scanning it, but I geeked on the social science.
Maybe it’s my English sense of humour but I found this not only informative but absolutely hilarious. Bacchus – do you have English ancestors?
I do, but only in my great-grandfather’s generation that I know of. Glad you found this funny! I do try to make my rants amusing. ;-)
I don’t understand everyone’s dislike of print magazines, I would much rather read a quality magazine like mental floss or something than click through a blog or website. No offense.
I love print magazines. Sadly, the industry is dying for a number of reasons — it’s unclear whether they will survive.
The hate in this thread is not for print magazines, it’s for clueless publishing industry people who don’t understand the internet, who are not sex-positive, and who send insulting spammy PR emails to bloggers in an attempt to get internet attention for their particular substandard offerings.