Aloft, the funky hotel brand of the Starwood group portfolio, is trying to make use of Twitter as a vehicle to deliver an RFP – er, “RFTweet” – for their next PR agency. While I’ll give them points for modern cleverness, I find it hard to believe that this will result in truly finding the best public relations partner. In fact, I find it offensive to PR professionals who are being asked to wait for @AloftHotels to tweet out questions and then tweet back with their best (proprietary, uninformed) ideas along with the hashtag #pitchaloft. What self-respecting spin doctor is going to beg for scraps and throw out half-baked ideas for all to see – or worse yet, risk really great ideas for competitors to steal? I could be completely wrong, but it seems to me that any relationship that begins this way is ill-fated… Nevertheless, I’ll be interested to see which agency ultimately gets the business. ~ @AdvertGirl
