Dear PR Flack:

I’m not sure what about my blog about cooking my way through the Alinea Cookbook gave you the impression that your missive about “the most buzzed about Grill cleaning gadgets on the market” was an appropriate pitch to send me.

You may also want to consider having someone in the office proofread emails like this before they go out. The message you sent has quite a few typos and grammatical errors — things reporters and bloggers consider when determining a product’s credibility.

xoxo,
~ Carol

Dear PR Flack:

If you send me a press release and I don’t bite, it’s a good bet that slightly rewording it and resending it won’t work either.

Oh, and also: Sending me image-file press releases with spelling errors and big JPEG artifacts doesn’t get you 86ed, but doesn’t help either.

xoxo,
~ Sam

Dear PR Flack,

“The Advertent Gardener” isn’t the name of my blog, much like your client’s business isn’t called “Teak, Wicker & Less”.

xoxo,
- Genie

Dear PR Flack:

I don’t even know where to start on your trainwreck of a pitch.

But let’s begin with a little mixology tutorial. Blending herbs or fruit into a cocktail is muddling not “muttling”. When a drink is served on the stem, it’s known as up, not “op.” I’m pretty sure “patron” is a proper noun (not to mention the missing accent over the o). And then there’s poor “caipirinia” — I’ve got to hand it to you there: I think you managed three different misspellings in a single word! I know foreign languages can be awfully tricky, but would it have killed you to look it up?

Garnish with a dash of random capitalization, a liberal dusting of extraneous commas, and a twist of utterly bizarre syntax. Mm, delicious!

Lastly: It may have escaped your grasp, but our San Francisco-based blog doesn’t generally cover Upper West Side bars, especially any that have the gall to charge $38 for a “martini” … made with (wait for it) tequila, that traditional martini spirit.

And thanks, too, for sending your message twice — complete with three giant, out-of-focus photo attachments. We always find that super helpful.

xoxo,
- Anita & Cameron

Dear PR Flack:

If I may quote your CEO’s blog entry from August 22nd of this year: “In essence, there are many ways one can utilize social media today to become a better PR pro.”

One of those ways is NOT mass-emailing bloggers. Just as you wouldn’t send out a blanket pitch to a randomly generated media list, similar rules apply for social media (especially in the tight-knit food blog world). We expect that PR pros will take a few seconds to weed out inappropriate blogs on a list, learn what the remaining blogs’ foci are, and then customize and target the most relevant pitches and messages accordingly.

After all, if your CEO publicly called out an account rep at [a competing agency] for pitching him and his blog on a service they were representing (which he pointed out, and I agree, was a clear lack of targeting or research on [the other guy]’s part), why would [your agency's] employee commit a similar foul?

One last thing: I think you meant to quote Bobby Flay as saying, “I bathe in it.” Not, “I bath in it.”

xoxo,
- Carol

Dear PR Flack:

Notice how I used “Dear” in my salutation, as opposed to “Hey”? That’s how professionals do it.

And, my name is Carol, not French Laundry at Home. You would have known that, had you taken 16 seconds to actually check out my blog before sending this email. You also would have learned that my blog is all about cooking every dish in The French Laundry Cookbook and writing about it.

In addition to the bad targeting and your obvious, and quite strange, love for ALL CAPS and exclamation points, your email is chock full of grammatical errors, run-on sentences, typos, and nothing newsworthy whatsoever, which makes me question your credibility as a public relations professional.

xoxo,
- Carol

Dear PR Flack:

With a membership of 22,000, surely [your international scientific society] has the funds to invest in a proofreader or a qualified public affairs employee who could better represent your organization to the media.

xoxo,
- Carol

Dear PR Flack:

You have two different spellings of the movie “Mamma Mia!” in your subject line and the body of the email, and you didn’t even spell the word “gourmet” properly. On top of all that, there’s nothing at all newsworthy about the email you sent me, so I’m not even sure what the purpose of this email could have been. Oh wait — I do know. You needed to bill your client — an independent businesswoman who trusted you to know your stuff — for work, and this is the best you could come up with. Not cool. Not cool at all.

xoxo,
- Carol