Category Archives: Spam

Extending the debate about PR spam

Posted on November 14, 2010 at 10:41 am UK

commschatEarlier this week, I hosted a CommsChat discussion via Twitter around the topic of “What should you do to stop PR spam?”, a topic I’ve written about quite a bit over the past few years and helped focus debate. The discussion took place on TweetChat, a service that lets you engage in real-time online conversation around a hashtag, in this case #commschat.

Started by Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle, two UK-based PR pros, CommsChat looks at all aspects of communication: PR, traditional and social media, journalism, blogging, marketing and more. The weekly one-hour chats tend to attract scores of participants from both sides of the Atlantic, and this one was no different.

As the host of the November 8 discussion, I wanted to see what participants would say to these specific points:

  • What is PR spam and do we agree that it’s a huge problem in the profession?
  • What do you do with your acquired data from Cision or Vocus?
  • In September, the CIPR published a charter on media spamming that, among other things, aims to help raise ethical standards in UK business practices regarding email use; and the PRSA runs professional development seminars in the US focused on best practices in media relations. How useful or effective are such initiatives by our professional associations?
  • What does best practice look like and how do you guide your colleagues?

Over the course of the hour, some lively discussion ensued. It was hard to keep up with much of it and impossible to do that for every tweet – you really do need to pay close attention to what’s happening – so it’s excellent that Adam and Emily enabled a full transcript of the complete discussion to be available to view and download from Scribd (and it’s embedded in this post, below).

Did the discussion come to any clear conclusions, weighty or otherwise? No, not really, but it did provide an opportunity and an outlet for every participant to voice their opinions and so contribute to the continuing debate.

Reflecting on the discussion afterwards, I think the group as a whole acknowledged that each of us in the PR profession has a clear responsibility for our own behaviour and how we conduct ourselves. That includes how we reach out to others via email. There’s clearly a need for education and awareness-raising on best practice, what’s acceptable and what’s not, and ethical behaviours – areas our professional associations are taking a strong lead on. If the discussion served the purpose of getting more people to think about these topics, then it was worthwhile.

CommsChat Transcript 81110

The subject of PR spam is a complex topic, one that won’t be resolved soon. Last Monday’s Twitter discussion brought fresh attention to the topic – which continues in the next TweetChat on Monday November 15 when Adam Parker, CEO of RealWire and the driving force behind the An Inconvenient PR Truth campaign earlier this year, will host discussion on part two of this subject, this time focussing on spam in a social media context.

The discussion continues at 8pm GMT on Monday. Add your voice and make a difference.

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Grasping the nettle of PR spam

Posted on October 1, 2010 at 8:07 am UK

Spam: a scourge of contemporary life. I’m talking about the digital variety rather than the savoury meat product originating in a mists-of-time, analogue age.

Just about the worst kind of spam I see is that which purports to be relevant and representative of good media relations or blogger relations or personal outreach or whatever. In other words, the kind of stuff I get from PRs that bombards my Outlook inbox every day.

Take a look at this screenshot of an email I received the other day that was trapped by Outlook’s junk mail filter and which I resurrected just for this post. I’m impressed with that aspect of Outlook: it’s effective and if it regards something as junk, I don’t argue.

spam-travelteq

I’ve never heard from the sender before (well, Outlook’s junk filter may have); the sender clearly has no idea about me (‘Dear editor’ is a clue), and packing the email to the gills with images and HTML files is a guarantee that sooner or later you and your domain will be on an anti-virus watch list.

Yet the worst thing about this crass and unimaginative missive is the sheer thoughtlessness of it. It’s all about the sender and her client, nothing about the receiver or making some kind of connection. It’s not even about running your text through a spell checker. And it’s clearly lacking any common sense.

And that’s probably the root of the problem. This is simply a mass mail-out that someone in the PR agency concerned thought was a good way to get the word out about their client: grab a mailing list, merge your text (minimal in this case), load up the stuff you want to thrust at your recipients and click ‘send.’

And check out this one:

spam-knowtification

Classic PR spam.

I’ve been banging on about PR spam for years and how it’s about individual and collective responsibility to stamp on such an insidious practice. It’s one of the reasons why the PR profession is so looked down upon by many journalists and others.

So could an initiative announced by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in the UK this week be a tipping point for common sense to kick in regarding how PRs reach out to people via email and other digital means?

The CIPR says that the Media Spamming Charter (PDF) provides guidance to CIPR members and the wider PR profession on standards of conduct when working with the media and bloggers.

The CIPR, the PRCA, the IRS and NUJ are united in their efforts to enhance professional standards. These best practice guidelines are designed as a point of reference for practitioners who work with journalists and bloggers. This document is a statement of best practice.”

It stems partly from the “An Inconvenient PR Truth” awareness-raising campaign earlier this year.

An Inconvenient PR Truth is a passionate plea to the PR Industry to take action to tackle the issue of pollution caused by the sending of press releases to journalists, editors, bloggers and publishers for whom they are irrelevant. This issue if left to continue, could cause irreparable damage to the influence that the PR industry seeks to achieve.

While some people think that outreach behaviours surely are guided by common sense – and I have no disagreement at all with that view – it’s clear that the influence of a professional body like the CIPR (as well as the others behind the charter: the Public Relations Consultants Association, the Investor Relations Society and the National Union of Journalists) can and should make a big difference.

Now I wonder how it’ll all work in practice. And how the client will be brought on board. And seeing a body like the Public Relations Society of America embrace the concept. After all, most PR spam originates in the USA (see screenshots above).

Still, I’m optimistic: anything by the professional associations – surely the guardians of best practice – that shines a bright light on a very bad PR practice has to be a good thing.

Let’s now return to normal programming.

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Marketers ‘destroy customer relationships online’

Posted on November 20, 2009 at 8:04 am UK

keepcalm A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problem with PR email, the results of a survey on people’s attitudes to the email that PR agencies and others send them.

The survey paints a dismal picture of how email is used in the PR business.

Now, here comes an equally bleak picture on what marketers do with email about their brands according to e-Orchard, a survey by London creative agency Stephens Francis Whitson.

Brand Republic reports:

[…] The report claims to have uncovered evidence of brand owners bombarding customers with irrelevant, mistimed and inappropriate emails.

It splits the brands into ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’, with the likes of Mini, BA and Ocado showing how it should be done.

While economic pressures are driving more brands online, many of the companies in the survey "are sending out blanket email campaigns simply because it is cheap to do so," the report claims.

The e-Orchard survey covers companies operating across a range of sectors such as retail, financial services, FMCG, travel, entertainment and leisure and argues that some brands surveyed showed:

  • Scant evidence of differentiated communications depending on customer knowledge, behaviour or value
  • Poor co-ordination of on and offline communications
  • Dangerously high frequency of highly repetitive, hard sell messages
  • Brands stuck on transmit: little attempt to engage in any genuine dialogue with customers
  • Rare examples of genuinely clever, creative, smart brand and commercial thinking

This looks like a worse picture than that suggested by the PR email survey.

Small comfort for anyone.

[Photo by cole007, used under Creative Commons license.]

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The problem with PR email

Posted on November 8, 2009 at 10:52 am UK

attachmentrecycle A timely story about that distribution channel so often misused by the PR industry – email.

In an article published in Journalism.co.uk (and elsewhere), Iain Fleming, who works for Newslink, a news aggregation and delivery service in the UK, writes about the results of a survey he carried a few months ago on people’s attitudes to the email that PR agencies and others send them.

Probably little surprise at some of Fleming’s findings:

[…] the results of my small survey – including responses from 101 editors, section editors, journalists and IT managers – showed just how much those working on news desks disliked the PR industry – despite their growing reliance on it. So much of what is being thrown at them is completely irrelevant – if it gets to them at all.

What does get through – and 95 per cent reported problems with email of which around a quarter said it was ‘every day’ – is sent in ways which either crash their systems or can’t be opened because their employers simply cannot afford to upgrade software on 200 computers as regularly as a small PR agency of just a few people can – and does.

And that is just for ‘traditional’ text and pictures. The message that a national newspaper can happily use a picture – even across several columns – if it is only a few hundred Kb in size has not got through to the PR people, who keep sending out 10Mb files at a time.

Move on to ‘new’ media and the situation is even worse, with the same issues of incompatible file types, too large files, poor quality content and stuff that is ‘just not newsworthy’ topping the list of complaints. A senior manager within ITV told me just last week how one station struggled for several hours to get video sent by a fire brigade into a format suitable for broadcast, but ran out of time and the bulletin went out minus the footage.

What a picture. Read the full story in its gory detail.

I like to look beyond the dismal picture Fleming paints. There are great opportunities for the few – yes, there are some – who get it right.

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[Photo by Neil Crosby, used under Creative Commons license.]

The fragility of the social web

Posted on August 7, 2009 at 8:58 am UK

twitterddos So it appears that the perpetrator of the denial of service (DoS) attack yesterday on Twitter, Facebook and some Google services was someone who wanted to prevent anyone connecting with a Georgian blogger called Cyxymu.

The attack which started in mid afternoon GMT meant that Twitter was completely offline for a number of hours and other networks such as Facebook suffered degraded service during that time, says CNET News.

[…] It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," [Max] Kelly [chief security officer at Facebook] said. "We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can."

Some reports speculate that the DoS attack was in the form of a spam email campaign where people clicked on a link in spam messages that referenced the Georgian blogger although Facebook doesn’t think it’s spam email. All Twitter says for now is:

[…that it] appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack. As to the motivation behind this event, we prefer not to speculate.

cyxymukgb The Georgian blogger Cyxymu is willing to speculate.

Whatever or whoever it was, it certainly caused serious disruption on the social web and to people’s ability to connect with others online in ways that are increasingly popular.

Ironically, I was offline and unplugged for much of yesterday and became aware of the Twitter outage when I came back online at about 4:15pm UK time. With no Twitter, I did the next-best thing: tried Facebook.

facebookomg

That was working for me.

Yet I soon switched away from Facebook’s closed walled garden to the more open and shareable Friendfeed.

fftwitterdown

What does this DoS attack and outage mean in the overall scale of things online?

Well, to me it says that the online tools and channels we use are relatively fragile and something we shouldn’t place too much reliance on at the expense of other means of communication.

Or if we do, we should recognize that fragility.

It’s also a stark reminder that bad guys anywhere are able to cause serious disruption to technology services we do rely on and so cause chaos on a global scale.

I can’t imagine for a minute that this is the last time we experience something like this.

There is a great deal more opinion and commentary you can read about this event. And here’s a different angle: the effects of this from an application/service developer’s point of view.

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