Email from them : ( edited to remove identifiers and for brevity )
Hi,
Hope this mail finds you well.
I’m writing to you on behalf of Brand (emphasis theirs) … For the same we would like to associate with you. Please find below the aesthetics involved:
You do this : (emphasis mine)
1. Promote on your social media channels
2. Promote on your blog by writing and photographing, we will also re-share on brand’s social media.
We will do this : (emphasis mine)
Brand would promote your blogpost/social media post on Brand’s social media platform.
Do let us know should you be interested in taking this forward.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
My response to email : “No thank you.”
If you don’t see what’s wrong with their email, you’re part of the problem. “You do all this work for us for free and we will take pity on you and use your content for free on our social media because you know, this month, we don’t really have a lot of content because you know the intern quit because we weren’t paying her.”
I don’t work for free. No amount of applying the bold text filter to the brand’s name is going to make me work for free. Especially when the brand is already notorious for not paying even its own employees. Remember, it is the age of the Internet. Everyone knows. Or almost everyone.
Your brand clearly needs the promotion, you better be ready to pay for it. Sending out a generic email to hundreds of suckers like me without even bothering to address each person by their name tells me all I need to know about the ego you have borrowed from the perceived ego of your brand. Stuff it. And while you’re at it, stuff the aesthetics too.
No one is DYING to work with your brand. ( Neither is there a brand that is dying to work with me, yes, I know. )
At the very least you’ll sucker someone into working for you for free maybe once. Is that your goal?
( Donald Trump’s photo used only as a representative image. Photographer : Matt Johnson. Link to License. )
