Magic MarketBuying and selling in the marketplace of ideas

Here is a fabulous suggestion! Before sending out a press release, look it over and make sure it doesn’t say anything dumb.

As a sometimes-journalist, I get sent some dreadful press releases, but this may be the funniest one. The subject: “Was Emily Dickinson Gay? Interviews Available.” Oh, are they really? Because I thought she was dead.

Anyway, the text of the press release is about a guy named Jerome Charyn who wrote a novel in the voice of Emily Dickinson. (I think that we can assume that it is comprised primarily of hyphens. But can it be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”?)

There are a few inexplicable forays into first-person: “it’s easy to see how Emily’s poetic instincts are born from the shifting sensations of comfort and resentment brought by a childhood spent serenading Father with my tiny Tambourine.”

But the best part comes at the end. After describing how fabulous this novel is, the release closes with this: “while this vivid impersonation is a stylistic achievement, it’s also confining and limits higher revelations. ”

Oh. Well, okay, thanks for the info. Did you just copypaste someone else’s review of the book and then spam-blast a bunch of freelancers without checking to make sure that the review was favorable? BRAVO.

And the second best part: the entire press release was formatted in Comic Sans. I don’t normally call out people for making careless mistakes, but that font is beyond the pale. The parties responsible: Mark Goldman (516)639-0988 & markgoldman73@gmail.com and Ryan McCormick at (516)901-1103 & Ryan@risingsunpr.com.

Once a week, the same person posts “How to make more money by generating qualified leads” or something similar in one of my LinkedIn groups. This wouldn’t be so objectionable except that it’s a repeal-prop-8 group — nothing related to marketing. I mean, this is like basically the definition of spamming.

It’s also worth noting that the person has a funny name: Velva Whetfield. This is maybe a time when proper branding calls for a nom de plume! Even “Vicky” would be better, even though that is kind of distracting because it is the name of the robot from small wonder.

Oh, two complainy posts in a row! Next time I will write about something that I like instead of just whining about what other people do to piss me off.

I wanted to write a post about A Day In Hand, but found it too difficult and gave up. Maybe this is more a problem with bad web design than with bad web marketing … but the two kind of go hand-in-hand, don’t they? Maybe. I guess we’ll never know, since I can’t write about this stupid handholding project. I mean, this very nice handholding project that unfortunately has a stupid website.

The problem with the site is that it simply took too long for me to find anything that I could use for an article. All the images are small, or worse, embedded in a Flash thingy that makes it practically impossible to embed anywhere else. I couldn’t find a succinct description about what the project participants actually do. There’s a video on the site, but it has no context and the first few seconds tell me nothing about what I’m about to see. There’s a menu with too many options (fifteen!) and useless titles like “Social Network” and “Links” and also “Linking to us.” AAAAGH.

Anyway. The project itself seems very pleasant. But I couldn’t even post to Tumblr about it because the images were all too small and there was no description of what I was actually linking to. So, bye, A Day In Hand! Sorry I couldn’t write about you! (PS: What on Earth is up with that header with the silhouettes? Is that from Newsies or something?)

It is popular to dislike online marketing. But here’s a situation where a little bit of marketing acumen could have made a real contribution to this project’s ability to participate in online discourse.