It seems the PR types are in overdrive at the moment as I’ve been on the receiving end of a number of “outreach” attempts in recent weeks. Last week it was Cision joyfully telling me that this place was in their weekly blog spotlight and would be going out to thousands of PR folk and journalists. Oh, joy. Presumably I was supposed to be thrilled by this news. As it happens, not one hit resulted from this spotlight, so that worked well, didn’t it? Also, would I mind completing a survey for them to publish alongside the spotlight – in the meantime, giving away my contact details to be spammed by people trying to either sell me something or get me to sell on their behalf. Now, I didn’t come down with the last shower of rain, so I didn’t respond. The spotlight went out anyway, but without any contact details or a bio on me.
Today, BlogDash wants me to compete my profile so that one of their clients who is keen to work with me can pitch their product or service. They want me to write for them. Again, yeah, right. Um, as I have never sought to set up a profile, I am not going to complete one that someone else has decided to set up for me. I don’t want to be pitched at, let alone decide what pitches I want to receive. The answer is none, thanks very much.
These two are just the latest and the two that stand out from the usual spam because the people who did it have, at least, tried to personalise their approach – as opposed to “dear blogger” or “dear webmaster” or some such. One of the problems such services face is that many – most probably – bloggers are like me and have no interest in PR approaches, so reject them out of hand. As a consequence, they are becoming more creative as they seek to engage people with an audience that they would like to tap into.
Even so, I have no interest in such approaches. I don’t do this for money. It’s a hobby. I earn enough from my paid work not to need to do paid blogging and if I did, it wouldn’t pay the bills anyway, so it’s pointless. And, frankly, if I do review a product or service, it will be as a genuine customer because I think you will be interested in the experience. That is, I’ll be writing about it because I am impressed, not because someone has paid me to shill it.
Nicely said:- life’s bad enough at times, without the harassment of PR/vendors/spammers (may their keyboards all jam and burst into flames).
But it must work on some, else they wouldn’t do it.
Clearly, however, the likely take-up is probably similar to any other type of cold calling; one in a hundred if they are lucky. Meantime, they irritate the other ninety-nine.
More like 1: 10 000 or even lower.
What really gets me is that we are on “Telephone Preference” (i.e. no cold-calling) & we STILL get these arseholes – usually calling from well outside Europe ( & I don’t men the EU when I say that… )
On the subject of Cold-calling… Having read your post on the Truecall box a few months ago, and after a particularly nasty bastard, when told by me to fuck off just before hanging up on him, had the temerity to call me back with a complaint about my attitude, I decided enough was enough and invested £80.
A few hours setting up the preferred caller list (had to start from scratch, didn’t have an electronic copy of my ‘phone list) and a couple of test calls later, all set. We went from five cold calls a day average, to ZERO in the last three months. Nice result, thanks for the tip, had never heard of this gadget before.
Jolly good. Pleased to be of service. I can’t praise the Truecall enough. Like you, I’ve had no cold calls since January. Now, how to stop the bastards pestering me on the mobile…