The best policy for any public relations firm trying to promote a client’s new book about working with social media is to not annoy the living heck out of the press.

Due to all of the blogs I work for, I get a tremendous amount of press releases in my email every day. Due to this fact, I thought nothing of the email I got from Brody Public Relations at 7:42 AM on Thursday to promote a book called Guide to Social Media For Small Business.  Just your standard release about a book about how a small business can use services like Twitter, LinkedIn and so on to get their business name out there.

The weirdness started at 8:00 AM when I got another email about it.  This time it was someone wanting to write about it.  Odd, but not anything to get worked up over.

Then another email came in at 8:37 AM…

… and 8:40 AM

… another arrived at 8:43 AM

Now they were turning in to emails from various members of the press saying they didn’t want to receive any more emails from this list.  All told I got 45 emails through out the day from this email disaster.  I especially enjoyed when I started getting support ticket emails from tech support because people couldn’t get the list to unsubscribe them.

Normally this might not have bothered me, but I was driving several hundred miles yesterday, and all my emails were set to go to my BlackBerry.  So all day long my phone sat in the passenger seat of my car, just vibrating away as each email came in.

It wasn’t even so much Brody Public Relations that annoyed me as the people who kept replying to the list even after they saw what was happening.  People kept saying that they need to do something to get off the list yada yada.  Did you ever think about composing a new email since Ms. Brody’s email address was in the press release?  How about calling her on the phone since she also listed her number to let her know?  No, instead people just kept hitting “reply”, and it just kept spinning further and further out of control.

So, not only was I annoyed by the original situation, but I get annoyed at my fellow bloggers who just kept spinning this thing further out of control.

Folks, if you see something isn’t working, don’t just keep hitting the button!