More email bankruptcy

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It all started with Luis Suarez’s experiment to dump email. Then, late last year I said I only want Twitter pitches. 45 comments and a lot of angst later…I’m still doing it that way. Mostly. I also use Topify from my Israeli VC buddy Ouriel Ohayon with email filtering for inbound Tweet stuff I might otherwise miss. Like on those rare occasions when I sleep.

This week both Dan Martin of BusinessZone and Charles Arthur of The Guardian are giving the email bankruptcy swap out for Twitter a go. This is what Dan had to say (kindly referencing yours truly)

It certainly worked in terms of cutting the amount of emails and telephone calls I receive. Over the two days, phone calls from PRs dropped from the usual 20 or so to an amount I could count on the fingers of one hand. There also certainly seemed to less emails hitting my inbox.

When it came to Twitter pitches – or twitches as I nicknamed them – many were pretty inventive; one even managed to put together a rhyme! I commissioned a couple of articles based on some twitches but unfortunately some PRs employed the same old tactics: a tweet asking me ‘are you interested in a good story?’ the worst among them. My response ‘Yes but I’m afraid you’ve used up your quota of tweets’ was unsurprisingly met with silence!

So what did it teach me?

Overall, I think was a success. It certainly got PRs thinking about how they interact with me and gave me time to concentrate the ever present of tasks on my To Do list. There’s still some way to go though.

You have to read the rest for Dan’s pearls on this topic. All, I’ll say is there’s not much with which I disagree.

Andrew Keen – he of The Cult of the Amateur and someone whom I treasure as a Twitter follower said yesterday that in his opinion, Twitter could kill PR as we know it. Woooah tiger. As a life long PR hater (sorry guys, I really struggle with most of you), I relish the thought but in reality – as I said to Andrew, we all need professionals. And that’s the key point. Professionals of all kinds are under attack.

When I cross posted a story about MyCake.org, Philip Woodgate said:

I think we will see more and more encroachment from the outside into what accountants have traditionally viewed as their space.

I’m still hearing on new pitches the reason for looking to move accountants is that despite urging the accountants to do more than regular compliance nothing results.

It doesn’t help when our trust barometer is recording stormy weather, but if we are to be seen as the trusted professionals I think we can be then we gotta up our game. Anything else is giving the ‘other guys’ a free gift they deserve because they’re doing it better.

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