This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: How not to impress a blogger Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Tom Murphy points to an all too typical marketing approach - the allegedly customized form letter. Did these ever work? They didn't impress me in snail mail, they don't impress me in email. Tom mentions a few other problems:

If they had taken the time to read even a week's postings the publicist in question would have found a post I%A0recently wrote on pitching%A0blogs that would have saved him making this mistake.

However, the pitch was a mail merge which rather than being targeted was sent to probably a large number of bloggers. How do I know? Check out this paragraph for tell tale mail merge problems:

"Tom %A0 %A0 %A0 %A0 %A0 %A0 %A0 %A0 , we'd like to meet you and see where we might be able to serve as a source for future articles and offer some possible story ideas for your readers. %A0If you'd like to have a one-on-one briefing, we'd like to get on your calendar right now. Please drop us an e-mail with times you've got available and we'll confirm your appointment and briefing."

The spaces after my name point to the tell tale signs of an incompetent mail merge. Looks like I'm not that special after all.

Heh, you would think someone bothering to put together a mass mailing would try not to look incompetent - without regard to the message, incompetence doesn't engender confidence.