PR Pitches Through Facebook: I Have 37, 366 Unread Emails in Gmail...

By Tom Foremski - January 30, 2008

There is a lot of interest in my experiment to give priority to PR pitches through Facebook. Here is my main reason for trying this approach:

I have 37,366 unread emails in my Gmail account, which is my one and only email service, and that is spam-free email. That means that pitches often get lost in the white noise of my inbox.

The unread emails have accumulated over about a two year span. And I'm hopeful that I will eventually get to all of them, but at this point I'm also hoping to get a stick of dynamite and blow up my inbox and start fresh.

While over at Facebook, I'm keeping up with my emails and it feels like a much less stressful environment. I often avoid my Gmail inbox because I won't surface for four or five hours dealing with emails.

I only have a limited number of keystrokes per day, and I have to reserve some of them for my writing, therefore I have to limit my Gmail exposure.

If you've sent me an email and I haven't replied, my apologies it is not personal, it does not mean I don't like you, it is my inability to deal with my email correspondence in a consistent manner. I don't know how people do it.

When I used to use Microsoft Outlook, I had a great way of dealing with emails that left a clean inbox. I would use filters and I would flag messages and I would send them into a "Very Important Emails" folder so that I could deal with them later.

But I would rarely visit that folder because I would prioritize my other tasks first: interviewing people, writing articles, call the kids, eat. Then late at night once I had finished all my other work I couldn't face several hours of dealing with my emails...

At least with Gmail, I can't hide the important emails inside a folder so I do answer quite a few every day. But it is still an overwhelming job so I'm hoping Facebook can become a more manageable inbox.

Also, only the people that read me and are interested in my work will know about my Facebook PR pitch preference and those are the people that I would rather work with anyway.

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January 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comment | Category: About SVW | Subscribe to SVW

Comments (6)

Tom Foremski:

kp: Yes, I have the book. Tim Ferriss' 4Hour Work Week is excellent too...


"... I only have a limited number of keystrokes per day"

Are our keystrokes currency?


Hi Tom,

PRX Builder has a Facebook application which allows your friends to add links to their releases into your Facebook News Feed.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2429087625

Do you think you'd pay attention to release links that show up in your News Feed, or do you prefer direct message contact only?


I only have 10,800 unread in Gmail. I feel like I'm losing.

But, it is hard to keep on top of it all, and I'll be interested in how the FB test goes.


It will be interesting to see how your FB experiment goes - I blogged last July about how FB could be used to improve
PR/press relationships.

http://escherman.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/is-facebook-the-future-of-pr-and-the-answer-to-charles-arthurs-prayers/

As for the in-box, why not just delete and start again.

Read this first:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/10/25/weapons-of-mass-distractions-and-the-art-of-letting-bad-things-happen/


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