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.