All Quiet on Bacardi Front

I’m a Fat-Man with some high fibre pretentions. We’ve been working with a PR company, Bite PR who seem to get it. They are open to ideas, bold enough to present new social media channels to their clients and better, to come to us to help devise long term social media monitoring solutions.

The pitch being, help the client aggregate the noise about them and filter it for them so the web doesn’t seem like such a big scary untamed space anymore.

PR as PR knows it is fucked. ‘Press Release’ is just fancy wordplay for ‘Spam’.

If Mike Arrington and Steve Rubel concur, it’s time to re-invent.

‘Most PR folks don’t read blogs and certainly don’t understand them. All they see is a Google alert with their clients name, and rush to put out a fire. Down the road they may try to bring those bloggers into the fold, largely relying on word of mouth as to the best way to approach them in lieu of actually reading the blog itself.’

Which brings me to the title of this post. Are Bacardi listenning? I emailed Steve Rubel about our daring attempt to attract an eyeball (they can use the other one for something else) of the CMO of Bacardi and extract money from them in return for bank busting, crunch defying ROI branded applications, making us Catalonia, Greater London and a bit of Hull’s first appvertising agency!

Steve didn’t respond, he doesn’t respond to 99.9% of emails.

‘Every day I am deluged with hundreds of PR pitches. They come from everywhere: startups, big companies, competing PR firms and, occasionally, from people inside Edelman where I work. I read all the emails but delete 99.99% of them. I don’t even respond. I feel bad about it, but they’re so off base I can’t even begin to tell you how bad they are.’

I think my email was bad and maybe Steve will tell you how bad. I have referred to him as resembling a meerkat in the past, but only in a jocular back slapping fashion.

Brain Solis was kind enough to respond ‘hey keep me informed’. Like we were friends, which was nice. He wears a monocle, I might too.

But nothing from White Rum Central, not a drip. Not a comment from a PRomator. Is anyone listenning to what people are saying about Bacardi online? I don’t imagine that many people have cause to mention the brand by name in a blog, Twitter, Facebook… so we can’t have got lost amongst the cacophany.

Glorified social media pitch experiment version 1.0 : FAILED.

They would do well to go here and search Flickr for ‘Bacardi’ and view the drunken, pool party, buckets of sick japery that the search brings back up.

Hopefully by the time I’ve perused the latest AdAge and Campaign and satiated my addiction to trade press publications, I’ll be out and at’em again and if it wasn’t so early I might even drink some Bacardi on an empty stomach, put on some toons and do some limbo dancing, virtual or not. Then my wife will come home and find me in a drunken stupor and I’ll have to tell her all about how cutsey savannah mammal Steve didn’t like my bad email and Bacardi won’t listen. Then she’ll call her lawyer.

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