In terms of internet PR, it doesn’t get much better than Edelman. Aside from that little flare up with the Wal-Mart splogs, the company has been on the cutting edge of new media since the beginning. Which is why the email posted below was so surprising; it’s from an Edelman employee, but it is absolutely the opposite of how you approach potential ‘connectors’ on the internet and exactly the opposite of what a good public relations guy does.

We (Tucker directly) got an email from Dan Cohen:

From: Dan Cohen [mailto: [email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 10:54 AM
To: Max, Tucker
Subject:  Super Hot Superfan Gets Hooked Up with Super Bowl Tickets

Wanted to shoot you a note about Sarah Spain, the die-hard Bears fan and gorgeous girl who tried to auction herself off on Ebay for a Super Bowl date and is now sifting through email submissions from guys who want to be her date. Sarah’s been blowing up the last couple days and has been receiving emails from guys all over the country looking to join her and her hot friends at the game. Check out her MySpace pages at: www.myspace.com/superbowldate and www.myspace.com/spainy.

 Any interest in speaking with Sarah or entering the contest? Also, are you heading down to Miami this weekend? If so, I’d love to put you two in touch. I know she’s hitting up a party or two this weekend, so if you’d like, I’m sure I can get you on a list.

Press Release

Super-Hot Super-Fan Wants To Take You To The Super Bowl!!!

                                                                 Sarah Spain Puts Herself Up For E-Auction, Gets Tickets to the Big Game, Now Looking For a Date 

HER  

STORY:          Sarah Spain wants nothing more than a Chicago Bears Super Bowl win; except maybe a chance to be there in person to do her own Super Bowl Shuffle. Sarah, unofficially crowned Miss Super Bowl XLI, recently put herself up for e-auction to snag a date to Sunday’s game. AXE, the legendary guy’s grooming brand known for hooking guys up with girls, has made her ploy an official reality.  AXE hooked her up with four tickets to the game, one for her, two for her friends, and to completely flip the story, a final ticket for a male date of her choice.Sarah is asking guys from around the country to email their most imaginative pitch about why they deserve to be her date to the big game.  Guys can email her at [email protected] to be considered for the final ticket to join her and two of her girlfriends. Want the 411 on this Bears beauty? Come and get it…

THE HOOK  

UP:                 • Interview opportunities with Sarah Spain

                        • Photos of Sarah Spain, her Super Bowl tickets, her lucky girlfriends and more…
                        • Recent press coverage of Sarah’s quest

  WHEN:          Phone Interviews: WHENEVER! Call for scheduling

Really? You’re inviting Tucker Max to a party? He must like that because he drinks a lot right? The number one rule of PR is KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. Robert Greene calls them ‘marks,’ I believe. Now think about the implied condescension in the email, Cohen is essentially saying: “You’re such a nobody, you need my help to get into a party where the main attraction is a girl selling herself on Ebay.” The last thing you ever want to do is insinuate superiority.

That mistake aside, the idea of Tucker interviewing her is ludicrous. Where would he do it? He’s not even a reporter. Knowing your mark makes these slipups unlikely. Seriously, just a quick scan of any of the Rudius sites would have made that request blatantly superfluous. By leaving it in, you solidify your chances of failure. This is why you need to know a least a little about every person you email. When I email potential people about a site we’ve launched or an article we think they’d like, I try to always include a detail that proves I spent time on there site. “You’re doing a great job, I loved last week’s article on…” or “I check your site each morning” or “I remember you linked to us a few months ago about this…so I thought you might like this…too” Think about it, the blogs are run by two distinct camps: People who do it for fun and people who do it for their livelihood. Neither have time nor the energy to put up with firms that won’t bother to respect them. If I am blogging as a hobby, I’m sure as hell not going to take crap from anyone. If I am blogging as a professional, I’m only going to deal with those who treat me as a professional.

There was just no effort put into this email. It was a joke. Just look at the language. If you’re not the best at putting together an email or anything to do with public relations, maybe getting help from a Top PR Agency before sending anything out will save you this sort of embarrassment and actually get the results you’re looking for.

Does anyone actually say “super hot super fan?”–let alone grown men? Tone is crucial. Sure, an email to Tucker is more relaxed than one to Scoble, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to pretend like you two are friends. In fact, tone is another means to solidify the fact that you know your audience. An email to Mark Cuban might be more stream-of-consciousness, as his writing style implies. An email to Perez Hilton can probably be lewder than one sent to Page Six. By adjusting your diction and demeanor to each individual site, you not only increase the likelihood of them respond positively to your request, but you also avoid looking rude.

Here is what I would have done. Written a legitimate email. “Tucker, I love the site, the people here at Edelman keep a close eye on you because you’re one of the hottest people on the internet. We’re repping Sarah Spain as part of an account for Axe Body Spray during the SuperBowl. If you have any ideas for us, I’d like to get you on the VIP list for all the big parties in Miami this week. If it doesn’t work out, maybe we can set something up in the future.

Dan”

That does two things: One, it’s honest and clearly personalized. Two, it puts the ball in the client’s court, which implies respect instead of disdain. Obviously, you’re talking to Tucker because he can help you, and not vice-versa, you’ll get nowhere pretending otherwise. By being open, and asking for help, you not only open yourself up to approaches you wouldn’t have thought up yourself, but you make the client more willing to respond.

In Made to Stick (great book, btw) they talk about the ‘gap theory’ of the mind–that through allusions you can drum up curiosity. This email does none of that because all the information is right there in plain sight. If you say “Sarah Spain” like she’s someone everyone knows about, then at least to some degree she becomes worth knowing about. Instead, Cohen makes it all to clear that she is just another lab-created viral shill. If he’d left out the Myspace and perhaps even the press release, he could have hooked Rudius into an investigative response, and thus, a dialogue. You need an aura of mystery, or at least the illusion of importance. If you don’t have that, why bother?

I also would have apologized after being called out for my arrogance.

Tucker to Dan:

“In the future, if you want to send me a personalized email, then do it. But do not send me spam. I would think Edelman of all places would understand this.”

Dan to Tucker:

“Sorry, figured you’d want to hear about this girl. I included the “spam-like” elements (media alert) just for your reference”

Let’s review. Bad product. Condescension. Spam. Wasted the client’s time. Won’t admit you’re wrong. Again, this is almost step by step, exactly what you don’t want to do in internet public relations. If you screw up, or–more importantly–if someone you contacted thinks you screwed up–bend over backwards to right that wrong. Every step of the way, this was avoided. In fact, the ball is still in Cohen’s court. Seriously, we’d love to have you email us back.

Edelman really is a great company. I met some of their guys on a Trojan roundtable they set up with Dr. Drew. It was a huge success, and an innovative, grassroots PR move. This, on the other hand, is typical, old-media aloofness. It’s out of touch, a shot in the dark. And worse, it insults a person with a HUGE internet presence. Everyone in PR makes mistakes, ironically enough, I made one on Steve Rubel’s Edelman blog not too long ago. But the point is to try and minimize them, and avoid the cardinal ones. Namely, pimping a product that isn’t interesting, spamming, talking down to people, not apologizing when someone calls you out on it.

I run 5 miles every night. It’s where I go to digest my day, hash out the multitude of information that’s been poured into me in the last wild six months or so, and to try and condense it down to some sort of cohesive strategy to live my life by.

Tonight, as I ran my laps, a familiar thing happened: someone tried to race me. A mile in, I came up on a runner as they entered the track, and made a move to pass him on the right. And like an asshole, he sped up.

It’s never your real competition that does this; it’s the mark of desperation. He was half my size, with a tiny, stuttered stride, and a form that burns stitches into your flesh. A real runner is out there for himself, and no one else. If it was about conflict, about proving superiority, you wouldn’t see them alone on the track at 4am, or on the streets in the pouring rain. I lace up my shoes each night because it’s precisely the opposite of what my body tells me it wants–that’s my motivation. So my pace is linear, rising steadily to the climax, not sporadic like a Richter scale. Running is like golf in the sense that it’s a continuous battle for control of your emotions. When you let them get away from you, your performance suffers. The instinct, when you’re challenged, is to chase after them. But if you do, you’ve already lost.

Emerson said that “there is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.” It’s accepting the imposition of another’s will on the racetrack that is suicide. You run to define yourself, and when you allow a short term challenge to alter your pace and long term strategy, you’ve just been defined by someone else.

What I’ve learned–and it’s probably one of the few life lessons I picked up on my own–is that if you continue at the pace you set for yourself, 9 times out of 10 you walk away the winner. I’ve picked up on the fact that success in life begins itself internally and manifests itself externally. And the only way you can reach your destiny is to define and then commit everything to achieving it.

And as I kept a constant stride, his fluctuations induced heavy breathing and staggered steps. And as I stayed fluid and loose, he grew rigid and paranoid. He swerved erratically, refusing to concede the inside or outside of the track. His breathing was frantic–it’s not good for you to sprint in the middle of a long distance run. He’d glance over his shoulder constantly, checking my status, which was maddeningly consistent. There is nothing more discouraging for the runner ahead to find that each time he speeds up, seconds later you’re still on his heels.

This is the pitfall that big business makes when they see the rising tide of revolution. They quicken their stride, increase their pace with frantic, misguided energy, and entirely lose their focus. There is a reason that almost every war strategist warns against emulating the tactics of the opposition–you become an inferior copy of your enemy. Robert Greene talks about this too: When you’re being pursued, or knocked off balance, he says, the key is to stop and mentally re-center yourself–and whatever you do don’t continue to do the very thing that got you in trouble. That’s what they call the definition of insanity. Instead, you try a new approach, or fix what wasn’t working.

Again, with internet video, as YouTube breathes down the neck of the networks, we find them attempting to build competitors–to in a sense, become a cut-rate copy of their enemy. Instead, they ought to be focusing on their strengths, the nearly limitless resources, the superior content, priceless franchises and intellectual property. With the music industry, they think that DRM is the solution to the downloading problem. They devote countless hours and capital to staying one-step ahead of the pirates, only to see them catch up just a few weeks later. Newspapers see the success of Digg and want to make their own, when they ought to be using the rankings as a Nielson-like barometer to guide their coverage. Ultimately, media needs to stick with what they do best, set their own pace, and devote everything to keeping.

It’s not just the old media either. How many rip-offs do we see of TheSuperficial or WWTDD? How many of those sites work on growing organic traffic with original, unique content? None, they all steal from the big guys and spam like crazy. That was the saving grace of Calacanis’ Netscape. Sure, it was similar to Digg, but it wasn’t a short term sprint at the lead. It was, and is an attempt to develop a real community for a separate niche audience.