The stages of emotion after losing a media contact list

A PR professional’s worst nightmare, among others of course, is losing the media contact list right before an event, or the mass distribution of a press release. My confidence when it came to holding on to this dependable list was at an ultimate high, and whilst trying to retrieve it. After receiving the same error message, one stating that my Office software did not recognize the file, I had no choice but to abandon trying to retrieve it further.

The first stage of denial was over quickly, offering up the continuation down the list of emotions that we feel when something is lost, or stolen.

Sadness

I cried.

I had worked long and hard to perfect this list – some of my contacts I’ve actually had a face-to-face conversation with and merited contacting them for events and press release distributions. Of course, this was not my whole list, which was excessive, but 98% of it was gone… Forever!

Anger

How could this happen? I took every preventative measure that I knew of, to retain this list to the highest standards of quality. I’ve tweaked, updated, and removed contacts on a regular basis; I took pride in this contact list. All this for nothing!

Anger has finally set in, stupid MS Office software.

Acceptance

There’s nothing else to do now but to reset and refresh, quite literally. The gathering of media contacts is not an easy task, those that have been able to develop, maintain, and retain a hearty list such as this will hold onto it for dear life – never let it go.

Unfortunately, for those PR professionals such as myself, shit happens and in this case all we can do is create the media contact list again, and back it up on a couple more USB sticks, including Google Docs.

At the end of the day, we suck it up, put on our big girl panties, and get to work on re-creating a document that will be used time and time again.