A Little Rant
I
came across a rant by Joe at Procooling. I find myself agreeing with a lot of
what Joe has to say but I have some of my own opinions. Here is Joe's
rant.
And
here is mine:
Yes,
the net is now rife with fly-by-night operations who select a clever name and
then send e-mails to every possible manufacturer, retailer, or supplier of products.
We see their press announcements when they start their new site - and we never
hear from them again. This is not to say that competition isn't welcome since
it is my belief that competition improves the quality of all the work on the web.
However....
Our entire industry
has lost a lot of credibility with manufacturers. I hate having to validate the
fact that we are a legitimate site to these companies. Rather than talking about
products or sorting out details to obtain a review sample I spend a lot of my
time sending stats and several review requests to different people within companies
until someone decides that we can have the sample. I realize people think that
we are overflowing with cool stuff and we simply pick what we will review or post
on our site. I wish that were true.
In
defense of the companies....
They
are flooded with requests for the same products. Imagine sending out a press release
and then being flooded by requests for review units. You'd have to be very picky
where you send your review units as you don't have an unlimited supply. So you
look at sites with high hit counts, who may offer advertising opportunities if
they find your product satisfactory, or worse yet, offer advertising lumped into
the package with the review. As a PR person you naturally pick the largest sites
that will give you good exposure and the most bang for your advertising buck.
