Last Friday, I had the pleasure of witnessing a PR crisis spelling out in the western blogosphere. It all started with Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker posting a status on Twitter about a new PR blacklist wiki she has created. She was apparently tired of PR folks sending her irrelevant emails and decided to filter out all emails coming from specific domains of PR agencies.

One of our PR 2.0 guys, Brian Solis replied to her saying ’some of us are trying to help’. Brian posted another tweet soon after - Making Mistakes and Amends in Blogger and Media Relations. Meanwhile Steve Rubel joined in by twitting - @ginatrapani Appreciate your concerns about PR spam but is it really that black and white? Finally Gina tweeted again - PR folks, thanks for your thoughtful replies. Here’s why I filter entire domains. She pointed to this post, which I am sure you will love visiting and reading about the journalist complaining about receiving irrelevant emails from PR people.

All this drama was happening in my Twitterfox right inside by browser. Quite entertaining. While all this time we profess to be PR 2.0 experts, we ended up on the PR blacklist.

So guys, lets try not repeat this in India. Rajesh recently wrote about some PR agency sending some kind of email that he had to sigh. Press releases are not wanted so much anymore by the media today, and especially not by the bloggers. And the copy and paste pitch email mass mailing has to stop. I remember in my early days, I used to send press releases to editors and follow up as well. Lucky me. Phew! The editors were kind enough to day ‘thanks, I will see to it’. I also remember a colleague who had the email addresses of about 500 journalists and he used to mail every press conference invite to all of them.

About journalists, I know one, for whom, in her junior years, I had asked questions to my own client on her behalf because she couldn’t ask any in an interview meeting. Now she is in a hot financial daily and doesn’t seem to recognise me. I also know a journalist who was working in a financial daily with a big shot ‘I hate PR’ attitude, but after she shifted to a daily tabloid recently, she is today the one sending interview requests to PR agencies. Those who used to hate PR yesterday are in corporate communications departments today.

So people, no use trying to wash the dirty laundry in public. Lets just try to make it work together.

Oh about the rest of the weekend, my wife had pretty pink butterfly tattoo done from a parlour at Priya complex in south Delhi. The experience was great (will post a video soon on my personal blog) but funny as well. Funny because the tattoo maker was trying very hard to be cool. Tattoos are cool. So tattoo makers have to be super cool you see.

Now let me shut up.

One last thing, just in case, I tweet at http://twitter.com/palinn