Lessons learned from some PR boneheads
Finally, we've got some more letters about our series on the 10 bonehead mistakes PR people make when they send email. Ivan Berger, best known for his New York Times articles, writes:

Sending out releases as attachments -- and, worse yet, as graphics -- becomes especially stupid at trade show time. As a freelancer, I get about 2,000 releases in the run-up to the Consumer Electronics Show. At least a third of those are sent as attachments. Those are the ones I don't get to open until after the show...if then.

That means I don't see a lot of invitations until long after the events have ended. It's hard enough attracting press to an event whose timing guarantees that at least three events will be competing with it. It gets harder, still, if some of the press never opens the invite.

Listen to Ivan, PR people. We're really trying to help. Ivan also has a question about organizing his incoming mail:

Incidentally, I keep a separate mailbox for releases. And while I use Outlook for my main correspondence account, I use Netscape on the news account. I have set it to flag mail with words like "invitation" by showing them in color -- any way I can color code Outlook mail, other than assigning colored flags?

That's easy. Yes, you can color-code Outlook. Use the Organize option under the Tools menu.

Continuing on the topic of PR mistakes, Martin Goldschmidt, Managing Director of Cooking Vinyl (a very cool indy record company), tells us:

I sent your article to all the PR people we employ directly and indirectly. They are a great team and I'm sure that they don't commit any of the felonies mentioned, and I'm doubly sure that they won't in the future. I also thought they might find it useful for training purposes. Couldn't believe the bonehead reply.

Neither could we. But we really do love our friends in PR anyway. In all seriousness, we've gotten some incredible help from the public relations industry and the ZATZ magazines wouldn't be nearly as good without their help. It's questionable whether we'd even be here without the help we've gotten from PR people throughout the years.

David Silver lives in California. He can be reached at dws90@yahoo.com.