Whether Alex Epstein’s email blunder this morning was accidental or not, it does nothing to help the reputation of the PR industry. The former Apprentice has unleashed a media shit storm and achieved notoriety by trending on Twitter.
Epstein sent an email pitching for personal PR opportunities to 800 journalists and made the mistake of copying all of the recipients. Presumably he meant to use blind copy. So far there is no sign of him making amends via his Twitter feed (@alex_epstein).
We’re back to the conversation about relevance and PR spam. We have been here many times before. Email should not be used for massive mail-outs; use a wire service and keep email for bespoke one-to-one pitches.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mynameisearl
and dhokes. dhokes said: RT @speedcomms: Former-Apprentice in email
PR cock-up http://goo.gl/fb/LLlJ4 (@wadds) #media #prspam
[...]
There are a couple of issues here – the obvious one is that
Alex should have spent more time researching the media and targeted
a small number of relevant journalists with bespoke pitches. He
obviously sees pitching as a tickbox exercise, like getting the
pitch out is the objective, not getting the results. The second
issue is that maybe media databases risk making PRs lazy? Just
imagine that Alex didn’t have access to the media database that he
used – he would have been forced to do the research manually and
would probably have got better results. It looks like he’s now
trying to position it as a clever stunt, but this sort of attention
is surely short-lived.
no communication platform is so black and white waddy,
excuse the pun. when a publicist becomes ingrained in the industry
within which they work then everyone knows each other (how many
industry functions have you been to with the same faces) and mass
mailouts can be used to alert the key influencers from particular
publications. they all know / talk to each other anyway? no, it’s
not a pitch per se one would utilise this for, but an alert. having
worked in pr for over six years in the uk and australia, i can
suggest, from experience, that emails are a flexible platform for
communication just like phone / conference calls etc.