Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Meet Mr. Stupid

I manage public relations for an environmental engineering firm. A large part of my job is securing editorial coverage for my firm. A few months ago I had a huge coupe, getting my firm featured in an article about women in the engineering field. It was to include an interview with one of our employees as well as her photo. Yesterday, I received my copy of the publication in the mail.

After my immediate thrill at seeing our name on the cover, I realized that is was misspelled. Ugh. A PR person's worst nightmare. All that effort, for what could be great coverage, that I can't use.

To set the stage, the firm is named for a person, which can often be confusing. He did exist at one point, but he has long been deceased and his name lives on through the firm. The name may be tricky for some to spell, let's say that is it "Johnny Quest, Inc." Other than replacing the actual firm name with this pseudonym, below is my actual email conversation with the editor of the publication.
_______________
Jim –
Thank you so much. I received the copies today and they look great. One problem I notice is that “Johnny” is spelled incorrectly throughout the entire thing. Is there a way we can get a corrected pdf of the article so we can post it to our website?

Thank you,
Amy
___________________

Hi, Amy:

I also had a question about the spelling of the company’s name, so I checked the Website, which lists the corporation as Jonny Quest, without the h. Please check and advise me if the Website is incorrect. Thanks.

Jim
___________________

I assure you, the name of the firm is Johnny Quest Inc. If you can give me the url that you saw the incorrect spelling, I will make sure that is fixed right away.
___________________
Hi, Amy:

I accessed the website for www.jonnyquest.com. When I went to johnnyquest.com, there was no listing. If I have somehow made an error, we can make a correction on the PDF files and in the next issue. Thanks.

Jim

___END OF EMAIL STRING

It is important to note that the writer we worked with on the interview spelled it correctly, I have a draft she sent me to review. In addition, the article actually has the correct url - which is neither of those he searched (www.quest.com) IN IT and this editor took it upon himself to do this bizarre search (who types in www.Whatever you think the website might be. com to check how to spell a company’s name?) and change the spelling. If he had just done a Google Search for either “Jonny Quest” or “Johnny Quest” the correct spelling would have come up!

Adding to my frustration, is that he doesn’t seem to believe me that it is incorrect! Is it just me, or are there more stupid people in the world today than there were even a few weeks ago?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, I see stupid people everywhere!

GreenStyleMom said...

I am sure it is frustrating when you are working with it, but reading the email chain made me laugh out loud!