Getting Ink

Was this the stupidest Tweet EVER? (probably)

The last week or so, I've been meaning to post something about those people who keep doing the Twitter equivalent of pushing a flyer in my face by incessantly promoting their books/seminars etc. You know the ones where you want to reply: "yes, I saw that message the first 20 times you posted it, thanks". But you don't, because, well, you're a coward and you want an easy life.

But sometimes you see something SO bad, SO poorly executed, you can't help yourself. Friends, this is that moment:

Around lunchtime today, I received an @ message on Twitter from someone called Ellen Brandt, saying "I Don't Like What You Wrote. You Should be Stabbed With Stiletto Heels, Have Vultures Eat Your Liver".

Not so unusual for a journo to get that sort of thing - but the comment was followed by a tiny.cc link. Checking it out, it was a link to a blog post, which turns out to be a sort of long and kinda dull ‘humorous’ article about people attacking other people online. It's also the only post on the blog, which is sort of weird.

The article seems to be the work of Dr Ellen Brandt, an entrepreneur and Ivy League educated historian who has written 3,000 magazine articles. Cripes. Turns out she’d posted the same @ Tweet to hundreds of people today, most of whom didn’t really get the joke and thought they were being insulted – cue lots of conversations where Ellen accuses them of having no sense of humour, of not being sophisticated enough to understand her humour, and – best of all – not understanding how the Internet works.

Sending an insulting Tweet with a blind link to your own blog is a GREAT idea, Ellen says, because:

Creative marketing is not "spam." We in Little Media must be creative to compete with Big Media. Interactivity is what makes Internet media different from print media.

Now I’m willing to bet that Ellen’s Twitter feed, blog post and business website (she writes up the life stories of 'ordinary' Americans) got thousands of hits out of that stunt today. Yay, right?

Except it’s still the most stupid Tweet I’ve ever seen. By a long way.

Because at least 50% of people will instantly dismiss Ellen as a spammer and block her from their accounts. All those connections, all those relationships, are now dead. Another significant proportion will have followed through the link, realised it was a bit of shameless self-promotion, and blocked Ellen from their accounts. Or will just ignore her the next time she gets in touch.

And an unfortunate few, who asked Ellen not to send them that sort of thing - well, they got insulted for their trouble. I particularly liked the woman who said she'd reported Ellen as a spammer and was told: "Sweetums. It is OVER. Do not talk to me again."

Way. To. Go. 

I think the lesson we can learn from this is:

• If it looks like a plug, sounds like a plug and clicks like a plug, it's a plug. Don't try and dress it up.
• Don't post links without telling people what they are.
• Don't assume people will get your sense of humour, especially when wishing them physical injury

And most important of all:

• If someone objects to your plug, don't call them stupid, unsophisticated or "sweetums" and ESPECIALLY don't do it online where it's indexed by Google and available for anyone to see for all time.

Pitching Parent Blogs - Top Tips

British parenting blogs are getting rather a lot of attention these days. Various papers are reporting that the "mommy blogging" phenomenon has officially landed in the UK, and the Tots100 index of parent blogs shows at least 500 UK blogs in this sector that are updated more than once a week.

As the blogging community has grown, of course, the blogs and bloggers are becoming increasingly attractive to the PR community. After all, why spend a fortune trying to get editorial in Practical Parenting magazine, when you can get almost the same exposure through one of the top UK parenting blogs – for free?

However, PRs should take note that parent bloggers are getting savvy to your ways. Susanna over at the Modern Mother blog is sick of being asked to do things without being paid, and her views are shared by many of the commenters on this post. Other bloggers resent being asked to promote your client’s brand out of the goodness of their hearts, or in return for a £20 freebie you’ve got lying around the office.

If you’re interested in reaching the growing audience of the UK’s parent blogs, here’s some tips for PR pros:

1. Research the blog first. Don't pitch a baby product to someone who has school-aged kids. Don't ask about little Emily if the blogger's child is called Esme. Remember that bloggers generally write in a personal not professional capacity so when you get it wrong, they're that much more offended than a journalist is when you get the name of their publication wrong. 
2. Read blogs. You'll soon notice parenting blogs tend to read like diaries of family life with the focus on personal experience. So why would they (or their readers) be interested in a press release? They're not a journalist - they don't really want to spend an hour turning the news about your client's new lotion into an amusing 300 word anecdote. Instead, look for ways to provide the blogger with an experience that will result in good, entertaining copy - to test out the product, to attend a product launch with other bloggers, to visit the company HQ.
3. Make life easy. Most parenting blogs are written by people with other day jobs. Or if they're not in a paid job, they're looking after demanding small people. So don't saddle them with a competition that requires them to set questions, write rules, check entries and pick a winner, before lugging the prizes to the Post Office. Take as much of this load away from the blogger as you can, so the competition doesn't cost them any additional time or effort.
4. Mummy bloggers will tell you they're part of a supportive community. Take it from someone who's seen the underbelly of parent blogging first hand - they're not. There are rivalries, cliques and feuds to rival anything you'll find in a traditional newsroom so if you're doing anything that involves more than one blog or blogger, do a little research to make sure you don't start a war in the process.
5. If you offer a blogger a review product, and you need to have the item returned, don't ask them to arrange the shipping. Don't ask them to write something positive. Don't post fake gushing comments on their review saying how much YOU love the product even if they thought it was crap. Yes, all of these things have happened.

Manners, much?

I write a blog for one of my clients, and recently posted something on life lessons we’d like to teach our children – you know, the stuff they learn that isn’t in text books.

One of the lessons I try to teach Flea is ‘manners take you places’. She knows when to say please and thank you, to say ‘excuse me’ when she wants to talk to someone who’s otherwise occupied, and that sort of thing. When she gets a bit older, I’ve got a new one to add to the list: return a bloody phone call once in a while.

Seriously, the media business is all about relationships – and it’s impossible to have a fulfilling relationship with voicemail.

I must waste an hour a day trying to get people on the phone. I call editors about pitches, I call PR agencies to arrange interviews, I speak to my various corporate and PR clients … and I inevitably hit the voicemail roadblock.

I recently had a contact email me with a query. I phoned them directly because the information they wanted wasn’t straightforward – it depended whether they wanted solution A or B. The call went to voicemail. So did a second call. Neither call was returned.

Eventually, we got into an email conversation instead, which took four times as long and meant what should have been a five minute job at 10am turned into eight emails back and forth, two iterations of the project document, and the job wasn't finished until 7pm. It's annoying and inefficient - for both of us, surely?

What’s really infuriating is I knew the client was in the office the whole time, screening calls, and basically didn't pick up the phone. I do it myself and I know it's an easy trap to fall into - you're busy, there's so much information coming from all directions and voicemail seems to save you time, right? Except it doesn't - you end up wasting time with asynchronous conversations, and you lose the opportunity to build a relationship in the same way you can when you're talking to someone in real-time.

In my book, there’s an etiquette with phone calls. Just as you shouldn’t take calls at the table, and you should turn your phone off in the cinema (seriously, who are those morons whose lives are so important they can’t turn a mobile off for 90 minutes?) you should try and respond when someone wants to talk to you – even if it’s to say “Now isn’t a great time, can I call you back in 10?”

When did it become okay to adopt this notion of “I’m so busy that I simply don’t have time to deal with other people”? As I tell Flea all the time, manners are about not making life harder for other people. So why don't we try answering the phone and returning calls once in a while?

Me, my blogs and I.

As a freelance writer, I’m increasingly being asked to write blogs for companies that don’t have time to produce three or four topical posts each week for themselves. I’m now a blogger for three different clients, in three different industries.

I find writing corporate blogs pretty fun. It’s mostly short pieces, you can express an opinion, and blogging is a great way to bring stories and posts you’ve found interesting to a wider audience. I really love when you start to see a blog you’ve written gaining traction in an industry – when links start appearing to your posts, and you’re regularly getting comments from readers.

But sometimes it’s REALLY difficult to balance the ‘me’ writing the blog, and the ‘client’ that is ostensibly the author.

Here’s the dilemma: to get traction, I think a blog needs a coherent personality, and a consistent voice. The best blogs – the ones I read regularly – feel like they’re written by a real person. Over time, you get a sense of who the blogger is – the sorts of issues that rile them, what kind of sense of humour they have…

As a blogger for my clients, I want their blogs to have that kind of identity, but I also feel blogs should be authentic and transparent. The more personality I give the blog (which is necessarily a version of my own personality), the less authentic I feel it becomes. When people respond to a post I’ve written about my opinions, and they think they’re responding to my client, it feels a bit dishonest somehow.

I’m really interested to know how other bloggers approach this issue – can you put ‘you’ aside when you’re blogging for someone else? Or should you be open about the fact that the client (or at least the MD) isn’t really writing the blog? If you write a blog from a purely corporate perspective without any personal anecdotes or opinion, do you alienate the audience? Or am I just worrying too much and this is just like writing a bylined article for your clients? 

Take That, 10 Years in Journalism and Trick or Treat...

So, I don’t know if I mentioned it or not (unless you count the multiple posts on Twitter, smug Facebook  status updates and the 5,000 emails I sent about it) but I was invited to go and see Take That last week by some lovely PR people, and I took along a friend.

As we were drinking champagne and swaying to “Back for Good” my companion asked if this was the best job-related perk EVER. I said it was definitely in the top 5 – although that status might be in danger if David at Quest ever gets around to buying me that Fat Rascal he promised…

Anyway, it got me thinking about the nicest things PR people have ever done for me (using their client’s budget, admittedly, but it’s the thought that counts). Since I’ve been a hack for 10 years, here’s my top 5:

1. Eating seafood and drinking Mojitos on a steamboat on the Mississippi. At least, right up until the moment the guy pulled out the A4 ring binder folder and said: “Let me tell you about IBM’s partner strategy…”
2. Driving up from Palo Alto to see the redwoods in California with an executive from a company that had just gone public. We sped up there in a red Porsche, and the exec told me Silicon Valley kids reckoned IPO stood for “instant Porsche owner”. This was in 2000, just before the dotcom crash, obviously.
3. Doing anything in Vegas. Because it’s the sort of place you’d never go of your own free will, but when you’re there, it’s AMAZING. What’s not to love about a fake Venetian canal inside a hotel? Genius.
4. Euro Disney. See previous example. Would never go there by myself but that didn’t stop me going on Space Mountain 10 times in a row.
5. Yeah, seeing Take That. It was pretty cool.

However, wherever there is sunshine, some rain must fall, right? So here, for your enjoyment are the five WORST things I’ve had to do for my job since 1999:

1. Sitting in the back seat of an ancient Skoda in the middle of Finland, with an Irish Wolfhound and an open window. It was minus 20 degrees, and we had to stop every 10 miles for the dog to pee. The car was driven by the PR of a search software company, and we were going to see someone about child porn. After an horrific interview, we discovered the lock of the car had frozen shut and we had to wait two hours in the snow to be rescued.
2. Trying to conduct an interview with an IBM executive in a hotel while there was someone hiding under the table. One of the longest half hours of my life.
3. CeBIT. The memories of those dark days in Hannover haunt me still.
4. Visiting the Yahoo server farm. Ever been to a co-location centre? Imagine a big room with REALLY LOUD fans and lots of black boxes with blinking lights. Now imagine spending 2 hours there, trying to look interested.
5. Being served a whole goat’s head in Marrakech and trying not to offend the hosts while spending the next hour really wishing I could just throw up.

Movie Project: what film always cheers you up?

As you may have noticed, blogging has been a bit light in recent months.

True to form, the moment my work settled into a nice, predictable pattern, the universe decided to turn everything else in my life upside down – just to keep me on my toes.

So while I’ve been dealing with broken cars, friends in crisis, a crumbling house, a complicated love life  and the sheer, unadulterated joy that is finding a decent primary school, my movie project has stumbled a bit. After a long day of drama, the last thing you feel like is sitting down to a sub-titled exploration of existential angst.

So, here's what I'd like to know: what movie do you watch after a rubbish day, when you want your faith in life and people restored, or you want to at least laugh until your sides ache? For me, the movies I watch on those days tend to be things like Big, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Princess Bride and (of course) Breakfast at Tiffany's.

What are your recommendations?

For those who are interested, here's my 2009 movie list so far:

The "movies that are totally worth your hard-earned cash" list:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Slumdog Millionaire
Coraline 3D
Persepolis ( thanks to Anne W for this one)
Spellbound
Lords of Dogtown
Best in Show ( thanks to Jess for that one)
Man on Wire
Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Zoolander
Star Trek (the JJ Abrams one, especially when I spotted Meghan's cameo)
The Beat that My Heart Skipped
Che Part I and II
Milk (thanks Alexandra W)
The Wrestler
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Let The Right One In
I’ve Loved You So Long ( thanks Joanne Mallon, I cried for about two hours)
Napoleon Dynamite (thanks Emily W)
Duck Soup (thanks Dom W for a GREAT recommendation!)
Run Lola Run (this one came from Lynn, I think)

The “movies that are really good but not great if you’re depressed” list:

No Country for Old Men
Fargo
Changeling
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Nil by Mouth (thanks Kate H)
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning ( thanks Crawford)

The “not everything I hoped it might be” list:

Taxi Driver
Complete History of My Sexual Failures
Inconvenient Truth
No Way Home
Moonstruck
March of the Penguins
Il Divo
Monsoon Wedding
Run Fat Boy Run (sorry Yeelim)
Wall E (Yes, Natalie, I BLAME YOU)

The “guilty pleasure” list:

Twilight
Confessions of a Shopaholic
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
17 Again
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
The Boat That Rocked
Son of Rambow

The “Oh Dear, I think my soul just died a little” list:

Mamma Mia
Knowing
Monsters Inc
Night at the Museum