| 04 August 2010
In what was surely an accidental tweet meant to be posted on a personal Twitter account, the @YankeesPR Twitter posted the following TwitPic (sure to be deleted soon) a few minutes ago:
"Here is a photo of me in the dugout @Old Timer's Day. I look very confused. Who are all these old farts? LOL"
Sooooo, yeah. That happened. Good to see the Yankees are hiring PR folks who truly care about the storied history of the franchise. Also, nice ring. We're sure you did a lot to deserve it.
To be clear, we're not offended at all that someone would say this. In fact, there are probably many people who would say "who are these old farts" on Old Timer's Day.. However, you wouldn't expect them to be working for the Yankees, especially as their PR person. Embarrassing.
UPDATE:
Reading our above post, we realize that our snark level was probably over the top. Some on Twitter rightfully called us out for somewhat of a personal vendetta. The fact is, the Yankees media relations staff makes NO effort to reach out to (or have open communications with) any writer/blogger/author who is not well-established and part of a major organization. We all read about this in Jane Heller's Confessions Of A She-Fan (and if you haven't, we HIGHLY recommend that book).
This type of policy doesn't work in PR. The job of PR (or media relations) professionals is to build relationships with people who can somehow change the public perception of your brand. By ignoring us when we make an innocent inquiry about sunblock policy, it makes us far less likely to overlook a blatant PR faux paus like the one we saw above.
The only reason this blog exists is to better the fan experience. Sometimes,we could use official comment to clarify a situation that we're reporting as FAN ADVOCATES. We'll use the recent sun block issue as an example. We saw sun block being taken away at the gate, we tweeted about it, and all of a sudden we had beat writers following us on Twitter and emailing us for more information. We had the NY Post contacting us, asking us how many families we saw having their sunblock taken away. The NY Post wanted to write a story (like they did back in '08) about how the Yankees were banning sunblock. We didn't hear back from the Yankees media relations staff, but we had enough integrity to explain to the Post that the story was really the incompetent security force and not necessarily Yankees policies. That wasn't a juicy story, so it never ran in the NY Post.
An "old farts" comment shouldn't cost anyone a job, but it illustrates an ill-advised social networking strategy that goes right along with the bad PR policies that we outlined above. How is someone who manages the PR Twitter account for a name as big as the Yankees allowed to also manage their personal Twitter account via the same client?
