We could have been the ones to get a bad PR flack fired. Two weeks ago, Nadine at Guerilla PR tried to airplane gaming blog Kotaku a big bowl of Napster payola:

“Napster is willing to pay you money, and all you have to do is keep your site lookin’ pretty. Napster…provides sites like yours with streaming flash-based links to their library. Super-easy!… You get 5% for downloads and $10 dollars for each subscription. Give us an email or call and say, “my site wants a sugar daddy”, we’ll hook you up.”

Barf.

Brian was only one stop on Nadine’s fun train, similar pitches went out to other blogs, including one by marketing professional, John Scalzi. He promptly dissected the letter and publicly spread its guts, including the President of Guerilla PR, Michael Leifer. Turns out Nadine made an unauthorized “cool kid” remix of the company’s pitch letter designed for comedy blogs. After spotting her craftwork in the stockades, Leifer fired her.

Starting to see a trend among companies when blogs expose their bad behavior: Apologize, declare the employee rogue, fire their ass, and say it will never happen again.

Full copy of the offending email, after the jump…

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————– Forwarded Message: ————–
From: “Nadine Dunn”
To: [redacted}@kotaku.com
Subject: Napster Loves Ya!
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 20:18:05 +0000

Hello Brian

Napster is willing to pay you money, and all you have to do is keep your site lookin’ pretty. Napster has taken their catalog of over 2 million songs and comedy routines and acquired the rights to provide sites like yours with streaming flash-based links to their library.

These cool links will add to your content and enable users to have a No-cost interactive audio experience.

Super-easy! Your users can cut and paste these audio links into their blogs, MySpace pages, etc. and you collect money. You get 5% for downloads and $10 dollars for each subscription. If you’d like to see an example of what it will look like on your site , checkout http://www.gumpop.com

Give us an email or call and say, “my site wants a sugar daddy”, we’ll hook you up.

Best,
Nadine

Nadine Dunn
guerilla PR, Inc.
212-[redacted]
nadine@guerillapr.com
http://www.guerillapr.com

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