Dear Firestone
Christopher L. Jorgensen
P.O. Box 546
Ames, IA 50010
January 11, 2009
Firestone
Bridgestone Americas, Inc.
535 Marriot Drive
PO Box 140990
Mashville, TN 37214-0990
Dear Firestone,
What’s a guy got to do to get some stickers or something else that’s cool? I’m asking for a friend. I know, I bet you hear that a lot, but in this case it’s true! My friend, Joel Postman, would like to know what it would take to get some stickers or something cool, so I said I’d ask, so I am asking. I promise to pass the information onto him.
Don’t be surprised if you get a request for something cool from Joel Postman. Well, unless you don’t answer this letter. Then I won’t know what to tell him, and he won’t know who to ask, and you’ll hear nothing. So if you don’t write back I’ll just assume you didn’t want Joel Postman writing you!
You do know who Joel Postman is, right?
Sincerely,
Christopher L. Jorgensen
Reply:
[Editor’s Note: Firestone did not send a reply. Just a lot of stuff: Stickers, two hats, and some free tires! Well, ok, so they didn’t send tires, but they did send the rest of the stuff pictured!]
Commentary:
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Christopher L. JorgensenPO Box 546
Ames, IA 50010
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Note: Address has been updated to reflect my current P.O. Box.
First off, let’s get the gratuitous product pimping out of the way. Here’s Joel’s book:
You should buy it if you use social media in your organization. If 100,000 of you bought his book using the above link I could probably run this site for another two or three years! Now we have that out of the way, I promise any further promotional linking will be subtle and underhanded (and like product placement in a movie you won’t even know it’s happening!).
You can’t blame Joel Postman for this site, but you can, more or less, blame him for my presence on twitter. I’m not sure if this is 100% accurate, but it’s how I remember it, and I am not above a little revisionist history, so regardless of how it happened, this is the story I tell when people ask, “How did you get to know Joel Postman so well?” Well, the internet alerts I have set up on goggle let me know of a tweet by @jpostman that said, “Dude sends letters to companies and posts their responses: http://www.jackassletters.com love this guy,” so I wrote him a letter telling him that he should know better than to profess his love for me on the internet. Things on the internet never die. Once on the internet it’s on the internet forever. So you could say that’s how our undying love began. So I joined up and started following him.
If that version isn’t entirely true it’s the story historians will be telling, so you might as well have your kids memorizing it this way.
At some point Joel mentioned that when he was a kid he’d write aftermarket car companies and ask for stickers and stuff. This sounded like a great idea, so once I looked up what “aftermarket” meant I decided there was no reason I couldn’t do this on his behalf. (I did not ask permission or make him aware that I was doing this.)
Only Firestone replied:
/images/letters/misc/JandCbfflabel.jpg
Since his name was on the box, and I asked for the swag using his name, I sent him the majority of the stuff. I kept a hat and some stickers!
Here’s what Joel looks like in that great Firestone hat:
/images/letters/misc/jpostman.jpg
Here’s me rocking this same hat:
/images/letters/misc/mefirestone.jpg
I stood in front of some Firestone tires at a Wal-Mart.
Unanswered Letter #1:
Unanswered Letter #2:
I’m sure Joel remembers it differently, but you just have to trust me that he’s wrong. And, Joel, thanks for the book: SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate. (See, told you I’d be subtle!)
I’ll be sure to let you all know what Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have to say about our joint applications! I haven’t told Joel about these yet.
By Christopher L. Jorgensen
Website: http://jackassletters.com