PR agencies and spam

To paraphrase the Wikipedia entry, spam is sending email that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients.

Unfortunately, way too many PR agencies are spammers.

Do you get email like this?: "I am Mrs. Ivanka Petroslovka and my late husband was oil minister of the Ukrane and I want to send you $24,000,000 (US dollar twenty four million only)."

Or like this?" "You Won the Euro Mega Lottery!"

Much of the crap I get from PR agencies is exactly the same. Spam. It is a broadcast email message sent by a PR agency to a huge number of journalists with the hope that some poor sucker is on deadline and will respond.

Ugh.

These days, you can find the e-mail addresses of reporters in seconds, either through commercial services that sell subscriptions to their databases of thousands of journalists or simply by using a search engine. Unfortunately, way too many PR people are spamming journalists with unsolicited and unrelenting commercial messages in the form of news releases and untargeted broadcast pitches.

In the last few days, I have received unsolicited broadcast spam press releases or PR pitches for:
> A new series of Latino books
> Revolutionary new user authentication technology
> A photography festival's lineup of artists
> The emerging leader in secure network access solutions opening its second development centre in Pune, India.
> How to manage today's threats to homeland security
> Somebody who is speaking at the Christians in Cable breakfast during The Cable Show '07

Some of the press releases and PR pitches are so utterly awful and so wildly off target to what I write about that I cannot even decide if they are conventional spam for the masses or spam for poor overworked journalists.

PR people need to stop shotgun-blasting news releases and blind pitches to hundreds (or even thousands) of journalists at a time—without giving any thought to what each reporter actually covers—just because the media databases make it so darn simple to do.

Please stop spamming.

Barraging large groups of journalists with indiscriminate PR materials is not a good strategy to get reporters and editors to pay attention to you.

OK, I'll admit that I didn't get as much sleep as I had hoped last night. My wife would say I was a little cranky in the morning. So, do you think maybe I am being too harsh?

I know that many PR agencies are terrific—their smart staffers craft individual pitches for reporters based on what they cover. Are you in this category? If so, your work is being dragged down by the action of the PR agency spammers.

Comments

[Charles Sauriol]

David.

I am an avid reader of your blog as well as your e-newsletter. I attended a lecture your gave in Chicago back in 2006 when I was working for CCNMatthews / Market Wire. I have since left CCN to return to working in PR. I am now a Senior Consultant with a PR firm and am more than ever interested in learning about Social media and how to target bloggers and other social media websites.

I also have to agree with your assessment of too many PR people are just blasting useless information to reporters without consideration or any thought at all. Back with CCN, I would never allow clients to send press releases "at large" just to generate more revenue - targeting has always been the key.

However, I am trying very hard to find appropriate ways to target bloggers about some of our clients products and projects. Some are very consumer-related and others are more cause-related. I don't want to be perceived by the community as simply pushing products down their throat but rather providing them with interesting fodder for them to learn and share with others....

any ideas?

Thanks.

[David Meerman Scott]

Hey Charles,

Congratulations on crossing over to the "dark side" of PR. (Just kidding – good PR people are extremely valuable, but spammers are not).

In speaking with my blogger friends and considering what’s happened on this blog, I think the best way is for you (or your clients themselves) to begin interacting with industry blogs BEFORE you want to pitch them something. Follow the blog and comment when appropriate. Send an email saying "I liked this post because…" The goal is to get the blogger to know who you are. Then later you can perhaps pitch something.

When you do pitch, don’t talk about what your product does, but instead talk about how the company solves problems for customers. People don’t care about products. They care about solving problems.

If you have a product that can be tested, offer a test version to the blogger.

I have an entire chapter on this subject in my new book "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" - pre-order on Amazon today.

Good luck and thanks for reading.

David

[Tim 'Gonzo' Gordon]

Even as a lowly podcaster and blogger (lowly meaning only that I don't get near the traffic that I'd like and consequently fly under the radar), I still end up with these mis-targeted PR blasts.

In fact, just today, I got the 4th request to interview the same author. Yup, the 4th time they've sent me the same press release. I've already written back once and politely declined to do an interview with the author.

You'd think they'd figure it out and give up.

I just delete this crap anymore. But yeah, still aggravating and a waste of time to send it.

I don't suppose your post will do that much good because these PR spammers probably don't even know who they're sending this stuff to. But thanks for bringing it up.

[David Meerman Scott]

Gonzodex,

You're right - it won't do much good because not that many PR people will take the time to read this...

David

[Rebecca]

I wrote a post recently about how/why marketers or sponsors are scared of bloggers. It's really interesting to see the other side of the scope, the view of the PR professional in regards to approaching bloggers.