David Emery Online

Public Relations

24 January 2007

It never fails to amaze me how some people just don’t “get it”, even when their entire job revolves around “getting it”.

As Ian has detailed a lovely PR company working on BTs behalf spammed what appears to be everybody who has blogged about BarCamp – including yours truly – a press release about BarCamp2. I personally don’t really mind too much – I get hundreds of spam mails every day, so one that’s vaguely about something I’m interested in is hardly the end of the world – but it just shows how far the PR industry at large has to go.

The whole ethos around BarCamp is that it’s a community event, and also massively over subscribed, so I can’t think what they were trying to gain by sending out a canned press release by email. Anybody who is interested enough in BarCamp London to write about it on their blog is going to know where to sign up already – it just reeks of a clueless PR company trying to convert their traditional press release based model into something that works with bloggers, and utterly failing in the process.

At some point companies like Octane PR – the sender of the email – are either going to have to adapt or die, and I think it’s much more likely it’ll be the former. What place to press releases have these days? They work nicely if you’re a lazy journalist trying to get a company to write your story for you, but the lazy journalists days are numbered too.

It must be incredibly frustrating for the people at BT that Ian and co are working with – they obviously understand the way the community works which is why they want to take part, but having press departments that don’t – and probably won’t – must be a cause of friction not only for BT but for every traditional large company out there.