PR Pitch from Hell: The Dumbest PR Mistake Ever?

The subject line "Love your blog! and question" led to the dumbest PR pitch ever.

Here's part of Miss Thing's pitch:

Since you're an expert in the web 2.0 world I really wanted to ask your opinion of a product (full disclosure, I'm working for them part-time) that is about collecting your online ...blah blah blah

I wrote back:

"sheesh! the link to yourname.com led to a porn site.
please take me off your list right now."

Miss Flack responded: (I am not making this up!)

"I actually didn't mean for you to click on that, it was just an example that your website would be hosted at whatever your name is .com."

PR peeps: check the links in your pitches before you send them out. Oy vey.

Absolutely Amazing!

Mike Willett
Willett Corporate Communications

OMG, that's pretty pathetic. Reminds me of the story of a writer who inserted x x x dot com (no spaces) in a doc as a placeholder. You can guess what happened next, right?

Yet another case of someone trying to do too much, too quickly and not taking the time to check their work. Case in point - newspapers are littered with typos. This was not the case 10 years ago and yet we have better spell check/grammar check technology. Go figure.

In theory it is better to go to the link copy it and then paste it. That makes sure you are going to the right site, even if you copy from a list of links you may be copying a site link which is similar.
Some one gave me a link to a youporn instead of a youtube. She had a lot of explaining to do.

Ouch! That's awful. Reminds me of the story in TechCrunch last year about a PR flack who thought spamming was a legitimate PR tactic. She blasted emails to CES (Consumer Electronics Show) attendees, despite not having permission to do so. When they complained, she got nasty.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/18/meet-lois-whitman-the-poster-child-for-everything-wrong-with-pr/