Me, in e-mail to PR agent, after receiving two particularly irrelevant press releases this morning:
I am not the least bit interested in fuel cell technology. I write about Windows and digital media. Not about fuel cells. I also don’t write about Macs, except when those Macs run Windows. So the press release about the world’s largest online community for Mac users was also irrelevant.
Can you at least make an EFFORT to target your releases to appropriate press? If you can’t do that, then take me off your list completely.
The reply floored me:
You never told me what you write about, so how would I know? I’ll just take you off the list if you’re that picky.
Wow. This particular flack has been in the business for as long as I have, which means we were working tradeshows together back in the Early Comdex era. She added my e-mail address to her mailing list without asking my permission, apparently without bothering to find out who I am or what I write about. And after all these years she hasn’t figured out how to use Google or Bacon’s to see which pitches might be appropriate for a particular journalist? Amazing.
Let’s see…
Unsolicited? Check.
Commercial? Yep.
E-mail? Indeed.
And I’m “picky” to ask her to stop spamming me? Heh.
In self-defense, I’ve set up a rule at my e-mail server to automatically delete any incoming messages from this domain.
Now, do you think this agency’s clients know that they’re being represented by someone so clueless? Do they know they’re basically pouring their PR dollars down a rathole? If you’re a marketing executive at a high-tech company, maybe you should check in with some editors to find out what they really think of the PR agency you’ve hired. You might be surprised.
Ed Bott 
Well said! I get the same irrelavant pitches all too often. I’ve taken the time to provide Bacon’s with more than enough data to give any PR person a clue as to where my interest are yet I still get pitches for products and technologies that are obviously outside my sphere of interest.
As someone who practices PR as part of the day job, I am amazed that these firms hire people with such poor research skills. The reaction you got though – you picky person you! – is simply beyond comprehension.
Sure sounds like someone at those companies failed to turn in their homework on the prospective PR agencies they were looking at hiring. Then again, maybe this PR company was once a reputable organization and has simply gone down-hill lately. It wouldn’t be the first…
On a follow-up note, maybe I’m in the wrong business. I think I could handle sending out mass-emails about products and collecting checks for it… Good bye 6×6 cubicle, hello luxury yact!
I used to get press releases from a company selling IPTV set-top boxes. Only problems were that they were for a US-based subscription network, which I was neither a member of nor living in the US so it was completely useless. Naturally their emails included full colour attachments, making each email about 1MB each.
They’ve stopped lately, which is nice.