Public Relations that are neither

One reason we created IT Garage was to give IT folks a way to talk about what they do without going through their employers' PR mill.

To help that along, I decided to treat ya'll to a sample of what it's like to be on the receiving end of that mill's standard output...

Here is a typical email from a PR person, who typically works for an outside agency, and typically has no real clue about what the client company makes:

Doc,

I see the theme for the September issue of Linux Journal is wireless communications. Our client, WiFear, makes a FIPS (Federal Innovation Progress Standard)-certified FearWall™ that effectively controls unwanted hacker intrusions within trusted enterprise context systems. They may be able to provide you with insights about data magnet downtime vulnerabilities and IT degaussing framework risks over both short and long term dynamic audit fraction samples.

For many years, industry requirements have enacted confidential standards surrounding conformance practices that only recently have begun to approach unforced compliance with Pitt-Staple-Bargas (PSB) requirements. Most competing products still fall short of Government Reform Enterprise Protrusion Reduction Act (GREPRA) standards, even once those are known.

WiFear's FearWall and SmallBox™ flagship products are used in many enterprises to effectively limit secure intrusion by mandated inspection regimes, which is why they have become recognized worldwide as the leading feature retention player in their segment.

I'd like to set up an interview for you with Zdb Lrfmstrdl, the co-founder and interim CTO of WiFear, to discuss any of the topics I just listed, or to show you how FearWall can serve as the cornerstone of any company's wireless prevention integration strategy.

Regards,

Carter Offnow

Lettice Gettace & Trubble

Ph: 499-335-8766

Fx: 499-335-8799

Here's how you write this kind of letter:

1. Leverage only the most highly refined internally-created marketing bullshit as source material. Ignore anything from engineering or other honest and reliable sources.
2. Pad the text with references to obscure regulatory bullshit, bogus market status, and other jive that nobody, including whoever orginated it, fully understands.
3. Show no evidence of having a meaningful relationship with anybody at the client company other than nameless marketing factota, in spite of being granted apparent permission to set up interviews with actual company executives.
4. Forget that a monthly magazine works three months out, at the very least; not two or less.
5. Show no interest in what the editor receiving the email has written in the past.
6. Show no interest in the editor's magazine, other than one item on an editorial calendar.
7. Provide no links, to anything.
8. Show no awareness that the Web even exists, much less serves as a useful source of information for anybody, much less an editor who probably spends his or her life looking stuff up on it, when he or she isn't busy also writing on it.
9. Always write as if you relied entirely on BuzzPhraser for content.
10. Or Dack's Web Economy Bullshit Generator...

I'll think of some more and add them on later. Meanwhile, feel free to add a few of your own.

It continues to amaze me, five years after we wrote Cluetrain, that technology PR continues to thrive in the same awful form we mocked in "Private Relations" (scroll down), here.

Don't get me wrong. There are good PR people out there. Here's Renee Blodgett, singing Edith Piaf with Halley Suitt in Halley's car on the way to lunch with Netfather Bob Metcalfe — and then posing with Yours Truly and The Man Himself in his office near Boston last week.

Does that mean I'm going to write something nice about Bob, or that Renee even brought up the fact that I've hardly written a damn thing yet about Greg Reinacker and NewsGator, the client to whom and which she has introduced me, repeatedly, over the last X months? No, but that's not my point, which is that Renee is what Malcolm Gladwell calls a connector. She relates. That's what people in her job need to do.

Anyway, all of this is way off the IT radar, especially at the rank & file level where most of the work gets done, including the DIY sort. Still, in the spirit of Dilbert, I thought I'd bring it up anyway.