Yes, common sense! What we should really take for granted is becoming as rare as miracles. People are so hasty in pushing their own agenda that there’s no time for courtesy, for being nice instead of completely selfish and oblivious of the fact you’re addressing a human being.

Never mind the poor texts sent through email, blog comments and all other channels. Never mind the “what’s in it for me part”! That’s a whole other level of refinement. I really mean the basics of social interaction. Like saying hello, using someone’s name, saying thank you and goodbye. Yes, I am talking about making that other person feel a bit more valuable than just a blog name and an email address you’ve just ticked on a long xls file.

This is becoming so rare, it scares me. OK, you have no time to look for my name, although you can see it on every post I publish. I get the pressure of long to-do lists. But use a ” Hello” or a “Hi” or just “Good morning”! Thank me for allotting 5 minutes of my time to your email or message, then drop a copy/paste line such as “Best regards” or “Have a great afternoon!”.

Either PR people lack all common courtesy skills, or they think bloggers are vane, sub-human creatures that don’t need hellos, but need their ego-boosting pat on the back. Something like saying you chose them because they rank well on some fairly popular site. By the way, try to use a site they actually show up as top dogs on!

I tend to believe it’s the first theory, because such thoughtless messages are also sent to journalists, business partners, customers and whoever else they might come in contact with, not just to bloggers! I understand the fast-paced, Internet-bound world we’re living in has turned us into creatures talking in text message and instant messaging slang. But even on Twitter and messenger we stop to say hello!

Let’s return to the basics! Let’s be nice and thoughtful, act like human beings and have a tidbit of common sense! It’s good PR

Popularity: 1% [?]

…be smart about how you try again!

I don’t really understand why some PR and marketing professionals are off to a good start and then mess it all up in the end! Let’s say you have a cool security product to promote. You wander around the blogosphere, looking for relevant blogs. You find them, you make sure they have covered a certain story, one presenting a problem your product can easily solve. You send a nice email to the author of the blog, showing that you’ve read it, understood who they target and only then contacted them.

All great! You get no reply for a couple of days. And you ask yourself: “Shouldn’t I remind them of my initial email?” And then you blow it! Instead of writing a short follow up email, you resend the same email, completely disregarding the fact you’ve already sent it again. If you take the time to try again, why not do it right?

Popularity: 5% [?]

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Welcome to a new edition of our almost-weekly reading roundup. First of all, I’d like to wish you Happy Monday! Hope your week is as bright as today’s sun, keep busy but don’t stress out, but before anything else, try reading the posts I’ve run across!

Tanya Maslach, guest writer on Women on Business gives businesses a new perspective: a few great lessons they could learn from Hollywood.

Liz Strauss, in her “Visible Authenticity” series, identifies 10 blogger best practices we should use when extending our reach.

We’ve all heard of sucessful blogger pitches, of results and of how we should adapt our message to each of the persons we contact. If you really want to see how it’s done, Tod Defren of PR Squared has published a great case study showing how exactly one should write to fit the profile and background of each blogger they contact.

Regardless of their field, ailing businesses have some common issues. Karen Swim of Words for Hire has identified 5 of the common problems businesses on a falling trend seem to be caught up in.

Mary Schmidt, a guest author on Lip-Sticking, has come up with a funny list of things to do when you want your emailes automatically ignored.

And to finish this week’s roundup on a funny note, I recommend Ian Lurie’s Geek Guide to Problem Solving, or otherwise put, 10 ways to think for yourself.

What did I miss? No matter how hard I try, I definitely can’t read all the great posts published in a week. So please tell me what you’ve come across and let’s all share our findings!

Have a lovely week!

Popularity: 7% [?]

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Welcome to the 14th editon of WOBM’s reading roundup! Hope you enjoy it and find something useful to help 2009 will be the year of increased interaction between brands and their targets. This is what Shannon Nelson of Pierce Mattie Public Relations believes will happen in next year’s business world.

Marketing and Sales, two deparments for which lots of virtual ink has flown, especially when it comes to them collaborating more effectively. Kyle Flaherty of EngageInPR has published an interesting article on what marketing should learn from sales.

There’s been quite a lot said on bad blogger pitches and they still happen. Here’s a nice list of the biggest 5 mistakes ever made when approaching a blogger, from the other side of the email – PR Meets Marketing. I’m guilty for more than half, not necessarily with bloggers.

Chris Brogan, just like yours truly, is not a big fan of Facebook. Yet he wrote an amazing guide on how not to be a jerk over there.

Our education is something we need to keep improving. Here are 5 free ways to do just that spotted by Women on Business.

What do do if your clients don’t read blogs? And a lot of people don’t or don’t know what they’re reading is a blog. Telling them won’t help, as they might get irritated. So here are five ways to approach those who are not blog lovers from Michael Martine of Remarkablogger.

If you’re wondering which are the do’s and don’ts of video, Benjamin Wayne has published a extremely insightful guest post on this topic on Drew’s Marketing Minute.

And to end this week’s edition in a cheerful way, here’s a funny and easy html guide for copywriters from Conversational Marketing.

Did I miss something really important? Please share it in the comment box!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Company X Romania is a well respected company on the domestic market. It’s been around for a while and would not for the life of me yield the “beginner marketer” idea in my head. Yet I got this spammy comment (yes, I always double-check Akismet) promoting one of their not so recent announcements. The comment was made by a guy linking to an internet marketing site of exactly one page. No link to company X whatsoever, just the info on them…

Now, there are a few issues to consider:

• Is X paying these guys or testing what they can do? Well, then, they are doing a pretty bad job, they don’t even use spammy links to X. And why would the company’s Romanian branch benefit from traffic from foreign sites when it clearly targets Romania?
• Are they trying to impress X Romania on their own, trying to get a contract signed? Really bad strategy then.
• Is this company trying to show off their web exposure skills and traffic increasing strategy to other bloggers? Even worse strategy…
• Are they harvesting links to their site with randomly picked news excerpts based on a blogger’s country of origin? Possible. Again, poor strategy! They promote their internet marketing services, I am sure there are quite a few posts here they could have chosen for a legitimate comment and a link (do follow one even)

If X Romania is actually paying these guys to generate traffic to their site, worse choice ever!

If X Romania is in no way affiliated with these spammers, how can they protect their image? Hope this is a one-time offense? Read this post and contact the guys? They have a one page site and two email addresses as contacts, is there any real chance to get them to stop? Hope everyone will understand it’s the last issue I pointed to and no one will think X=SPAM?

What can you really do when a bogus “internet marketing guru” is using your brand to spam others? Disclose it and hope for some good online coverage? Warn said company and hope they’ll stop. Ignore them and pray this goes away without an image crisis? What do you think?

Popularity: 8% [?]