The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

Why don't publicists get it?

I get a fair amount of email from public relations experts, publicists and marketing folk, but every so often I get something that just makes me gasp with amazement at how poorly this person has done their job. It's not that it's full of typographical errors - though that certainly doesn't reflect well on the sender or the product being hyped - but more that the basic idea of publicity, of marketing, is that you need to appeal to your target audience and that the more you can engage them the more likely they are to read your material.

That's not rocket science, is it?

But how do you explain this message I received today?

My name is             - I work with a publicity and communications company called                     that is responsible for bringing interesting new entertainment information to the most influential sites on the web.

We've recently been working with author               and have been promoting his new novel, "                   ",   as well as setting up author interviews and book reviews. I am doing PR for the book and I was reading your blog and thought it would be something you might be interested in. If you are, I would be happy to send you a copy if you would mention it in the form of a review.

I have included the press release below.

Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon.

Best Regards

But perhaps this is symptomatic of the reality of marketing in the trenches, when important projects like book publicity become numbers games, and when tapping into the blogging "zeitgeist" is about spamming, about quantity, not about identifying people who would have something intelligent and thoughtful to say about a given product or service?

Marketing into the blogosphere is happening, and it's going to happen more in the next few years - just watch - but please, folks, this just isn't how it should be done.

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