The folks at Pushing Daisies want to give me pie in the hopes of having me watch their show.

One of the main characters in the series is a pie maker. And as part of the ramp up for season 2, promoters are going around the country in a mobile pie hole delivering pie and pushing the series.  They’re trying to get the word out via targeted folks and reach people who may be interested in the show.  I find the criteria for their objectives to be dubious and ill-considered.  I would know — they’ve tried three different social media outlets to reach me.

First, I received an email through via our podcast account, Chicago Bites, asking us to promote the tour.  Chicago Bites is a restaurant review site — we don’t promote food events and/or television shows there.  We do talk about pie on occasion, so I can see where they thought we might be a good target.  I guess we need to put a FYI up for media/promotion types so we don’t get these types of requests.  I doubt it would’ve deterred them since the email we received was boilerplate and didn’t reach out to us as podcasters.

Second, Pushing Daisies started following Chicago Bites on Twitter. I’m pretty sure they did a search on Twitter for pie, foodies, restaurants, cupcakes, desserts, etc. and started following the heck out of anyone who used those terms.  Since we already got an email about the promotion, I’m not certain what this was meant to achieve.  They didn’t send out a personal message or check to see if the folks listed on their email campaign were the same folks they were trying to reach via Twitter.  This attempt was pure twittering to advertise.

Third, MobilePieHole added me as a contact on Flickr.  Again, the show apparently tracked down anyone who had tagged a photo with the word pie and started adding them to the account.  I have my Chicago Bites and Twitter affiliations listed on my profile, but they didn’t start there since this was the third attempt.  It would’ve been nice if they’d checked to see if I’d already been saturated with their pie, so to speak.  They also didn’t have a good shot of their pie in their Flickr stream, which was disappointing to me as a food photographer.

I like pie.  Since I have some free time, I might go by the Mobile Pie Hole and get a slice.  I may even take a picture of the pie.  However, I dislike Pushing Daisies.  The show is overwrought, sappy, has horrible narration, an overdone theme song, and a dubious premise.  This social media campaign, while comprehensive in tapping me as a foodie, can in no way succeed in making me like that dumb-ass show.  Fail, fail, fail.

To the Pushing Daisies folks — thanks for the free pie and insight into your show’s promotion.  For season 3, try a listening campaign — monitor social media outlets for positive mentions of your show and then reach out to those people specifically.  If you’ve figured out how to set up accounts on these services, then take the next step and use them strategically.  Blanketing everyone with your pie can cause more ill will than good.

I love this bike!