And you think you have a terrible job…

You could be working for Bacon’s Information, Inc  and sending clueless emails to bloggers!

Christine Birkner, Special Project Supervisor at Bacon’s Information, Inc. has the embarrassing chore of sending an incredibly off-target email to bloggers along with a broken survey in MS Word and a request to fax the results back to her!

I received an email from Bacon’s asking for my help. I am glad to offer assistance to anyone who sincerely requests it, so I opened Christine’s survey and found a corrupted MS Word document instead of the web-based surveys that bloggers use constantly. I couldn’t answer the survey because the document was broken, but the choice of answers precluded any intelligent responses anyway!

Look at this first question:

1) What is the primary reason you blog?

   -To document my opinions on topics I am interested in
   -I am a recognized authority in my field
   -Want to open up dialog with others interested in the same topics

Notice that I must choose between expressing opinions or being a "recognized" authority in my field. I guess if you are not "recognized", your information is considered opinion.

What about reporting findings from research? What about reporting observations of current events? Has the writer of this survey ever read a blog? What about Rathergate did she not understand?

Bacon’s represents itself as a media/blogging database for PR professionals and yet they do not understand the Internet or bloggers.

I was moved to send an email to Christine as follows:

Christine,

This is a lame survey on several accounts.

1. You have used a Word survey when a web-based survey would be better and faster.
2. Your limited choice of responses shows little understanding of blogging.

Your approach casts great doubt on the ability of Bacons to provide any meaningful information to PR professionals on blogs and bloggers. If you are a legitimate source of media information, I suggest you engage bloggers in real communication and develop an approach that will provide real data to your PR public.

Bloggers Allan Jenkins and Mitch Joel have expressed their opinions far more humorously than I. It appears that Bacon’s may get more information than they bargained for, even with a broken survey.

Tags:

This entry was posted in Weblog as Power Tool. Bookmark the permalink.

0 Responses to And you think you have a terrible job…

Leave a Reply to david parmet Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

÷ one = eight

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.