Sometimes the schedule-conflicts acquire a propulsive momentum of their own, as events pile up like lucky buns on a Cheng Chau festival bun-tower. At times we almost welcome easing into deadline-week, when we're so busy crashing the magazine together that carving out time for a press conference is simply out of the question.
Good PR "flacks" (a slang term we hacks respect) know what we need and get it to us in a no-nonsense fashion: interviews, quotes, high-resolution print-ready images. They dish it up pronto, because they know we have deadlines. In this climate, we overlook salutations like the slightly mushy "Dear media friends" or the more egregious "Buddy mail"--we know they're well meant. But when these syrupy prefaces garnish fluffy press releases, they somehow become more gaseous.
And of course, we closely follow IT security, so we know not to click on embedded links from sources we don't trust...OK, we don't really trust anyone, so we type URLs or check from bookmarks. Thus we were startled to receive this in our e-mail in-boxes (our feedback in ALL CAPS):
"Hi Friends of the media, (WE'RE ALREADY IRKED)
It's not a spam email, no worries. Do click this link, and you will have great fun watching it!! (RIGHT! IMMEDIATE YELLOW CARD)
www.[DODGY URL DELETED].com
Happy Valentine's Day!
Cheers,
[NAME DELETED]
Public Relations Manager"
This could have avoided a red card, but it came from the Hong Kong branch of a noted online auction site, whose email domain has been repeatedly hacked by phishers. True, it's got a .hk stuck on the end, but given the voracity of the previous phishmails, the fluffy nature of the email, embedded link, spurious holiday tie-in and oxymoronic salutation (we are friends of the media because...we ARE the media), this receives the dreaded OffLine Red Card. Right, you: off the field, hit the showers. Game over.
Divining the digerati
Few metrics are quite as illustrative as spam: those greasy emails that promise riches both sacred and profane. Lately, the question hasn't been "how many," but rather, where.
La langue de spamme is usually English, but vexing yet quirky emails in Vietnamese have been turning up in our inboxes. How Vietnamese spammers got our contact info, we don't know, but think of it: isn't it a benchmark for digital literacy when spammers decide there's enough critical mass in any given language to mount a cyberspam campaign? Someone has decided that blasting out a squillion emails in Vietnamese will somehow snare a few dozen Vietnamese-readers with cash to spare.
Surely this is a sign that Vietnam is ascending in the realms of the digerati. After all, when's the last time you received spam written in Burmese, Khmer or Hindi?
Then again, it could be because Vietnamese can be written in Romanized text. At any rate, whoever's running the Dich Vu Mail List, we are not interested in "1 trieu dia chi email danh cho Quang cao, gia cuc re trong dip Tet." Thanks anyway.
PR flack needs decaf
Agency Indigo seems besotted with the phenomenon of email. Over the Chinese New Year holiday, when many of your devoted CWHK staff were cooling their overheated cyberbrains in exotic locales (or playing "couch potato" with TVB droning away on the 42-inch plasma), one enthusiastic Indigo flack took it upon herself to send a flurry of emails. While each one included an attachment, there was a paucity of information in the body of the email itself. "Please find attached photo release from [CLIENT NAME DELETED] today for your reference," for example, a cryptic missive that did not inspire us to check said attachment.
The hyperactive flack did not desist as the Year of the Dog dawned, but rather, ramped up her caffeine level, although the content level remained minimal. Among the cyberbones she frantically hurled our way were three identical emails sent in a single day, all without explanation (save an attached Word document...in Chinese) for a total in-box clog of over 6MB.
The moral of this story: send press releases in text format in the body of the email, and keep attachments to a minimum or, better yet, don't include them as a matter of course. Simple text emails that state their purpose rapidly get our attention. Emailers who click "attach" thinking they've accomplished something rapidly get our "DELETE."