Everybody ought to have a blog

Well, every publicist or marketing director, anyway.

Now, we all make mistakes. A few weeks back, I sent Steve Smith a potential Time Out NY listing without a date. He was kind enough to write back (errr...when is this??) rather than simply ignoring me, which would have been deserved. But I received two comments on this blog today that will certainly make me think about my pitching efforts and relationship with journalists going forward.

The first was an e mail suggesting I write about a website that I already written about, not five days ago. I'm not entirely sure how the person who pitched the site to me even located the "Contact" section on this blog without noticing the relevant entry, but she managed to. We live in the custom-built-for-the-lazy Age of Google. It is...painfully...simple to find out if someone has already written about your artist (or website, in this case), the fact that you're supposedly an expert on that which you are pitching (and consequently should know its press history) notwithstanding.

The second, and worse, was a comment on a recent entry ("I have had it with these motherf-ing snakes on this motherf-ing plane!"), from the American Symphony Orchestra. Not an actual comment, but rather a listing for an upcoming concert of theirs! What the Leon Botstein is this?? They tried to list a concert on a blog entry that used the word "motherf-ing" (2x) and referenced Snakes on a Plane, of all things! Did they think they could just sneak it in, folks would see it in the comment field - a blatant advertisement apropos of nothing - and buy tickets? Also - SPOILER ALERT - this is a blog about classical music publicity, so the ASO clearly didn't pay attention to where they were posting these listing-comments. Not incidentally, I asked two other ArtsJournal bloggers about this, and they got the same comment on recent entries. Is that...SPAM?

Not only is this just very odd, but it demonstrates a total lack of understanding of blog culture and etiquette. [insert "blog 'etiquette' is an oxymoron" joke __here__].

That said, perhaps the clever, clever American Symphony Orchestra has simply outsmarted me. If they purposely marketed their concert in an absurd fashion so I would post about it on this blog and consequently promote their concert, my hat goes off to them. Well-played. Well-played indeed.