Are you okay with being addressed in such a way?

According to Twitter, many are not.  Personally, I’m not bothered!

I never get involved with Twitter bashings, and in actual fact, I haven’t seen anything recently on there (I’ve been nursing a collective of ill children!) and haven’t been on twitter properly really since before Christmas, so this isn’t a response to anything I’ve seen, its just my musings. So if co-incidentally, someone has let off a bit of steam, please don’t think this is directed at you!  It’s really come about because I had to send out a ‘help me, quick, I need your thoughts’ email to many many people, and pondered on how they may take it…   You know, your mind wanders off at a bit of a tangent sometimes…. Well, mine did!

Okay, there could be better openings, but you know what, if a PR has got a press release that she or he wants to get sent out urgently to as many online portals as possible, there’s no way on earth that PR is going to spend hours, if not days, or even weeks, trawling through their database of hundreds and hundreds of contacts to email each person individually.

Why? Because I do it myself.  If I’m prepping ahead on articles for future inclusion on here, then rather than risk missing out a contact, I’ll draft up one email, and send it out on mass.  Okay, so I do state that it’s a mass generic email, and apologise for doing so, explaining that I have time constraints etc, but in the main, it’s well received, and obviously I do reply personally to each respondent.  In fact, I’ve only once had someone reply back with ‘Unsubscribe’ as their message, but it turns out that they were once representing beauty brands, but moved away from beauty into food… a long story!

But in reality, even if I had 50 hours in a day, it would take all my time just sending out the same email over and over again, even cutting and pasting it, and putting in each person’s name individually.  At the end of the day, that same email goes to everyone… They know that, we know that.

So why is it that people take issue with emails that begin ‘Hi There’ or ‘Dear Blogger’ in what is quite obviously a mass email?  Being part of directories such as Diary Directory and Beauty4Media will open these doors for you, so you probably need to expect emails of this type, and key to recognising a mass email (and that your name has been picked up as a blogger worth sharing the news with) is exactly such an impersonal approach.  Is it these mass send out brand emails that lack any personal recognition, or those that seem to be from a misdirected Social Media agency that is just playing a numbers game and is hoping that someone, anyone, will respond that irk the most?

I was having a conversation in the forum just today with one of the Pro Artists about Gratis products for Makeup Artists that credit brands in magazines, and she was asking who gives gratis. I explained that my database of hundreds of PR contacts has been built up slowly over the last goodness knows how many years.  It has taken me a long time and in the early days, it was a laborious process introducing myself over and over again, explaining about the forum, how the review section worked, where we see ourselves in the market etc etc, and that hard work has paid off.

So what if the PR that I speak to twice a week sends out a mass email to probably hundreds of other writers, and heads it up ‘Hi There’.  It doesn’t bother me, at least it gets the press release in front of me!

And in fact, I’ve made some fantastic contacts.  We’ve all received the press release that is totally unrelated to our area of interest, but a polite reply back with ‘this isn’t relevant to me, but I work in such and such a field, do you represent any brands that may be relevant’ has opened up some great communications.

In fact, and I’m sure they won’t mind me saying, I have a fabulous relationship with the Alex Silver PR team, all as a result of an emailed press release that wasn’t quite right for me.  Now though, we talk back and forth on at least a weekly basis, discussing ideas and thoughts for future articles, and we do have a great relationship (they even tweeted it not that long ago!).

I was also recently witness to an email that a PR agency was sent as a reply to their ‘Hi There’ mass email. The response was rude, ignorant, and quite frankly, unneccessary.  This was from a gentleman that works in a totally unrelated field, and I’m sure the original email was sent out by accident, but it didn’t warrant the response that the PR received.

Of course, there are times when it’s not appropriate, when I want to speak to a specific brand about a specific article, I’m not going to write a generic email to them, but in the same vein, I really can’t see that a PR agency who wants me in particular to give airspace to a product is going to start it ‘Hi There’, they’re going to start it ‘Hi Sam’!

So, what do you think?

Are you bothered by ‘Dear Blogger’ or ‘Hi There’ emails, do you get cross when you see someone on Twitter saying ‘Dear PR, I have a name, it’s not hard to find’ or are you not fussed either way? Is it a case of proving you’re on a mailing list by tweeting ‘Dear PR, learn my name’ or is it a legitimate way of letting off a little steam? Maybe it’s just that you’ve had one too many that day, and enough was enough? Or do you think, well, that PR has a huge workload anyway, I’m really not going to get grumpy about ‘Hi There’ and ‘Dear Blogger’ emails.

Would love to hear your thoughts, either way!