Ghost Writing Gone Wrong. We offer this service through M Com Publishing and we do this quite well. Just in case you do not know what ghost writing is, ghost writing is when an author has an idea and we interview, then write the story for them. Well, I had someone contact me on Facebook wanting me to ghost write a story for him. The concept was great, however he had a budget of let’s say $500. I know this is a case of most people do not know the time involved, and it honestly takes hours, but $500? Thank goodness I was able to hide behind my computer and laugh when I read that message. What did I really want to say? You need to add a zero to that buddy. At least.
Freaky Photographer. I had to post this one on Facebook, because I was just about dying over this one. This is a lesson of never, ever hand out your rolodex ever and this one really took the cake. The post I wrote was asking if photographers should know how to resize photos. Even I know how to do that. The short story is basically a 5 minute task, turned into a two day fiasco. My contact at a magazine asked for pictures from a recent event. Here is the drill, send in three photos with event details and label names from left to right. Done. 5 minutes. Well, this photographer not only did not send me the zip file that she supposedly sent the day prior (which amazingly appeared in my inbox the next day), she took it upon herself to send the photos in to the publisher of the magazine, going over my contact’s head. You NEVER do this from a PR standpoint. Even funnier, is that she sent in a non-labeled zip file, and then proceeded to lecture me about the proper format to send in photos. Not only have I been doing this for 5 years, I am still baffled as to why she could not send me 3 photos between 1MB and 2MB. I was lectured about this too. The bottom line is that I am very thankful my contact was not ticked off at all of the emails and guess who I will never work with again.
PR 101 is NOT for me. It never fails to amaze me on how people send out non-targeted emails. If you want to spam me, please send me something that I may end up purchasing or maybe a RFP for a speaking gig. If I see one more SEO spam email or PR course email I am going to tear my hair out. My favorite is the continual invite by PR 101 to go to a class on how to put clients in media. Um, really? The next time I receive one of these things I am going to respond and ask them if they want me to speak at their event instead.
