My Interview with Brian Morrissey of Adweek – Part 1 of 2
March 24th, 2008 by Susan
Early last week I noticed one of my Facebook friends, Brian Morrissey of Adweek, had a feed from his Twitter account saying simply, “doesn’t want to get PR pitches in Facebook.” It prompted a reply so I simply asked Brian if he would like to do an interview for our blog. Thankfully Brian did. Here’s the first half of my interview, stay tuned for the second half.
Why did you sign up for Facebook? What benefits do you see there?
I signed up for Facebook a while ago. Executives there were aghast I used a young coworker’s account to learn the site. They set up an account for me to be me. Obviously, since then Facebook’s exploded. Pretty soon, I got Facebook invitations from industry people. At some point, I started to use it more like LinkedIn. I estimate 90 percent of my “friends” on Facebook are people I either know as sources, PR people or people who are in the industry but I don’t know. The benefit of it that I see is mainly as a way to build some kind of connection with people outside of interviewing them. I can’t have coffee or drinks with people all the time. This is a way to mix the personal with the professional. Like most of social media, it works because it’s not dissimilar to how people interact in the real world. It’s just more efficient online.
Do you friend people you don’t know or haven’t spoken to before?
Yes, I do unless they’re spammers. I’m of two minds about this. I realize that as a reporter a certain amount of people will know me by name at least. I’ve been writing about this stuff for several years, after all. I’m a little uneasy about PR people “friending” me on Facebook because I understand they market their access to reporters to clients. I’d hate for that to somehow imply some kind of access. I know Saul Hansell has a practice of not accepting PR requests on Facebook. I never came up with a policy like that. For the most part, it’s been fine, I think.
You replied to my request for an interview through Facebook but in the past, you’ve stated you don’t want to get PR pitches on Facebook – do you only want pitches by email and phone?
Should I not have replied? I’d have preferred if you emailed me at Adweek. That’s why I requested you send the questions to my work account. I don’t want to get pitched on Facebook. It generates an email to my personal account. It’s just inefficient for me to get pitches there.
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