Lost in Transmission
I dread to think how much eBay is paying Waggener Edstrom to handle press relations for their Toy Crusade. At least I think that's what is being launched -- all the press stuff I received this morning, including image-laden email, attachments was all in Chinese. Oh, except for the headline.
I know I should, but I don't speak Chinese.
Now, admittedly, the event is about China, it's being organized in Hong Kong, and the website itself is entirely in Chinese (no English version in sight), but you'd think one of the world's biggest PR agencies could have managed
- to have a database of journalists' language preferences clue: names are often a giveaway), or
- perhaps an English-language version somewhere in the text, or
- a link to an English-language version, or
- an explanation that this is a Chinese-language only event/issue, or
- a link on the email indicating it was sent by an intern with no idea of what mayhem he may be creating for himself by blasting off emails to all and sundry, or
- a link in the email to a place where we journalists can complain volubly and ensure we never receive another email like it.
Serious lesson in this: At the very least, this kind of email is likely to end up as spam in a non-Chinese speaking recipient's email inbox because the Bayesian filters will have been trained to treat it as such. (This is what happened to mine.) So that's all pretty much a waste of everyone's time.
But at the most, as a PR agency you're being paid large amounts of money to target the message to the right people. I'm clearly not the right people. So either don't send it to me, or send me an English language version, or send me a query about whether this might be of interest. Or expect me to get grumpy, and take 15 minutes of my day to write a grumpy blog post like this.
Update, Aug 27 2007: I've just heard from Waggener who have offered an apology and explanation:
In the case of the toy crusade press release, a staff member accidentally inserted the wrong distribution list, and this was overlooked by their supervisor during the checking process.
People do make mistakes and of course the individuals concerned are very apologetic. To be sure, we have also added more safeguards to the process to minimize the likelihood of this ever happening again.
Fair play. Of course it's better that these things don't happen, but they do, and their response is measured and the right one. The proof will be in the pudding -- will it happen again?
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