We left the Harry Potter Making of tour yesterday towing a purple screaming tearful four year old who was a potent mix of upset and furious that we didn’t spend £25 on a replica collectors edition magic wand for him.
I sometimes wonder whether the sense of entitlement for excessive toy purchasing that the boy has is a useful metaphor for us bloggers in dealing with public relation agencies and marketeers. There have apparently been discussions on Britmums and Bloggered (well a discussion on the discussion really, how meta) recently about apparent unreasonable approaches from “PR’s”- HOW dare they send me a blanket press release? HOW dare they CC everyone rather than BCC? HOW dare they use a template email? The list is endless and varying in reasonableness, but half of them could easily have “DON’T THEY KNOW WHO I AM?” appended to them.
Yes, I’d rather certain people in the parent blogging arena didn’t have my email address but mistakes like CC’ing rather than BCC’ing happen, and on the first instance it happened to me, I emailed the offender and said “never mind, we all make mistakes, it’s not as if anyone’s died The amount of sheer vitriol she’d had from others on the list was mind blowing and I actually got a “thank you!”
Whatever people think, social media marketing is still in it’s infancy and mistakes will be made on both sides. But at it’s heart it’s an interaction between people. What right do you have to be excessively rude to someone who is only trying to do their job? I’m lucky in my line of work, I don’t tend to get shouted at. It’s happened in previous employments though and I’d go home, lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling rerunning it endlessly. A vicious email is just the same. All because someone was in a hurry, or doing what they were told.
Lifes too short, hit delete, laugh to yourself and move on.