Yesterday, in a post in response to a piece by Marshall Kirkpatrick, I somewhat snarkingly pointed out that Marshall had reproduced a supposedly private one-to-one Facebook email conversation to illustrate what he thinks is wrong with many PR pitches. (I’m a big fan of Marshall’s blog, and his observations on the PR pitches in question were on the money. He and I emailed back and forth a bit on this and he was a very good sport.)

Today, Chris Anderson has upped the ante, with Sorry PR people: you’re blocked, in which he publishes the email addresses of all of the PR people he has blacklisted because they have sent him something “inappropriate.” I guess bloggers are good and mad about what they see as lame or misdirected PR pitches, but I really call into question this tactic. Not only is it unnecessarily personally embarrassing to the people and agencies involved, it’s obviously retaliatory in that it opens all of these people to an increased volume of spam as bots harvest these addresses from the page. If you have to publish the list, how hard would it have been to turn it into an image file?

Again, there are multiple lessons here for PR people. Think long and hard before pitching a blogger. Get to know the blogger and pitch him/her based on the blogger’s preferences. Develop and maintain real relationships based on mutual trust and understanding. Or end up on a list like this for all to see.

chris anderson, marshall kirkpatrick, pr people, pr pitches, Public Relations, Social Media

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