Suburban Oblivion

I have no idea where he picked up this lovely phrase, but every so often my 2 year old will run up to me out of the blue and say “Mommy, I see in your nose, and you got burgers!!” Burgers somehow sounds more pleasant than boogers, so I haven’t bothered to correct him. Not to mention I’m incredibly immature well-humored and it makes me giggle like mad when he says it. Giggling causes him to repeat it a few times, sending me into further fits of laughter, and he starts laughing too. Good times I tell ya.

Last night one of the older two decided they needed to correct him on it, and before you know it, Damian is running around telling us all we have boogers. I wasn’t nearly as amused by this, but he was incredibly excited about his new-found phrase. So excited he turns to our back door, opens it, stands in the doorway, and yells as loud as his little lungs will allow “I see in your nose, and you got BOOGERS!!!!”. Before I could stop him, he did it again, no less quietly. If the whole neighborhood didn’t know about Damian and his boogers, they do now.

We be klassy like that.

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Thanks to a nifty little Wordpress plugin by Stephen Cronin, the full vs. partial feed debate is officially OVER. With this kick-ass widget, you can now offer *both* full and partial feeds, allowing your readers to make the choice which version they want. Check out my upper right corner to see what I mean. The plugin comes as a button or text, I chose text and edited out the comments feed since I find them rather useless.

Suburban Oblivion is now like Burger King- have it your way!

(I don’t make a habit of using the ‘more’ tag, but this is gonna be a long one. Apologies to the full feed readers.)

I exchanged several e-mails with Dan Williams, the PR guy with SpecialOpsMedia that I wrote about last week. For those following the story, here is what happened..

Hey Sara,
I hope you are doing well. I saw your post this morning and just wanted to apologize to you personally for your not delivering on promised DVDs.

As you can imagine we send out emails when campaigns start the email volume responses can be a bit hectic and sometimes difficult to wade through. The two DVDs you mentioned in your post were to be mailed out directly from a fulfillment person and not from me personally. So I often have to go with the assumption that the requests we forward on are being fulfilled in a timely manner by our fulfillment person. That said, it’s clear from your disappointment that I should have done a better job making sure you received what was promised to you.

As an act of good faith and a measure to show you that you and all bloggers we work with are of the greatest importance to us and our clients. I am personally sending out some copies to you today from our offices, in an effort to improve our reputation among you and your colleagues.

I do help this helps in some small way to re-establish a relationship.

If you ever need to contact me please feel free to do so.

Thanks,
Dan

Ps. Can you please resend your address And I’ll send out the product.

This felt a little canned to me, and honestly just served to annoy me more, so I sent him this.

Dan,

I have thought long and hard over whether or not to even reply to your email, but in the end decided it would be an opportunity to take advantage of. Please take this message in the spirit it was intended- not to bust your chops, but to enlighten you a little from the bloggers point of view.

To tell a blogger the email can be difficult to wade through says that you don’t read all your emails. Maybe some of them are handled by someone else; maybe you have a sorting method that needs improving, who knows. Would it help to have the email marked high priority, or do you welcome phone calls if a problem like this arises? Consider adding something along those lines to the form email that gets sent out, so we know we truly are welcome to contact you, and that it will be considered a priority, not just another email you have to wade through.

To offer to send the movies now shows you really misunderstood what the problem was. The dvd’s are not the issue. I appreciate the offer to rectify that end of the situation, but that truly is not what got me so annoyed. It was the lack of respect shown to someone you are basically asking to work for you for free. To not answer emails shows that you are, intentionally or otherwise, treating your list of bloggers like a spam list. I initially welcomed this opportunity because my readers are your perfect target audience, and it gives us something good to write about that day. I enjoy Disney movies, my kids love them, and so it was a welcome change to know beforehand that the review would most likely be favorable. The movies not showing up were not a terribly big deal, it was the lack of response to my emails, topped with yet another message about yet another movie.

Would you be inclined to do a favor for someone who ignored you unless they wanted something?

Finally, please consider keeping your bloggers mailing addresses on file. For you to have to ask for information I know I’ve sent you at least twice shows me that I am important enough to keep a contact card on, but not important enough to actually fill it out. Once again you edge dangerously close to treating it like a spam list. If there truly is going to be a ‘relationship’ in any sense of the word, you have to begin realizing there is a person behind the email address, and we deserve just as much respect as any other client you work with.

As I mentioned, I will be doing a short series on PR-bloggers relations at http://www.suburbanoblivion.com over the next week, I would certainly welcome your comments and input, and hope you will take this as an opportunity to think about the way you handle such situations in the future.

Sara J.
Suburbanoblivion.com

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