PR: The way not to do it (part of a continuing series)

You’d think AOL would be a PR machine, cranking out the answers, calling you back, feeding you the information you want or need. Harumph, you’d think. SNEWS has tried for 10 days to get some nibble of information from AOL about an alleged informal poll of Americans on their exercise desires. We’ve searched every AOL website like good girls and boys before we tried calling the company. When we did reach someone, we were told rather lamely to go look at the website, and it was “maybe under Channels somewhere.” We told them that wasn’t good enough, and if they wanted us to write about it, we needed the details or the exact URL so we didn’t waste any more time hunting and pecking. OK, they’d call us back. Wrong. We tried again two days later. And then again. We finally landed a good communications person who really tried, but couldn’t find any details. So anyway, long story really short, AOL Interactive supposedly did a poll of more than 55,000 people who maybe said they want to diet and exercise. Maybe.