PR Firm Calls Blogger 'Bitch,' Then Lectures Her About Manners
Brandlink Communications is a nationwide PR firm with a minimum of two employees who are astoundingly inept: the one who sent the blogger the stupid celebrity pitch, and the one who called her a "fucking bitch," without apology.
The blogger in question is "The Bloggess," and in complete fairness, we would not read her blog by choice even if you offered us a substantial sum of money. However! She is popular. She has 168,000 Twitter followers. Therefore, when a PR firm sends her some idiotic celebrity pitch and she responds with her snippy little "you are an idiot flack" reply, the proper thing to do is to apologize, or to ignore her.
Instead, the Brandlink employee sent her own snippy little reply. And then! Brandlink VP Jose Martinez mistakenly hit "reply all" and, in true "mistaken reply all" fashion, wrote "What a fucking bitch!"
Can you guess what happened next? The Bloggess sent her own snippy reply, yes, of course. But what really makes this such a fun, fun story is that VP Jose Martinez decided to write back to her, after this! Savvy PR in action, ahoy!
Jose: I get it and I was out of line by saying that however you put way too much effort
into your approach. A simple "I don't cover this, no thanks" or "Please remove"
would suffice. To go out of your way to be snarky and rude is a little
inappropriate. Again, I should've been less harsh – but I also feel like your email
was rude and unprofessional as well. We will do a better job to research who we are
pitching but maybe you should be flattered that you are even viewed relevant enough
to be pitched at all instead of alienated PR firms and PR people – who are actually
the livelihood of any journalists business. Don't be offended, you started the
cursing game so maybe we should all just laugh it off and plan not to work together
in the future.
"A guy who will call an influential blogger a 'fucking bitch' and then lecture her about being 'rude' is the man that your company wants to entrust its reputation to," is what it says in all of the classic Public Relations textbooks. And now Brandlink Communications is Twittering about unfair "bullying," by the internet. Whew.
Fridays. Amirite?