For the record a couple of other posts on this snafu:
Phil Gomes points out the issue was that people were using her PERSONAL e-mail address. [I hadn't spotted that myself]
Jeremy Pepper pipes in on the same factoid, but makes a broader point about PR people not being trained in good practice in this area – and like Damien bemoans the lack of focus on relationships.
Susan Getgood suggests that blacklists just don’t work…
Several people have told me that Gina Trapani’s personal email address is listed as her contact info in Cision/MediaMap, which could account for a lot of her angst.
This whole thing is ridiculous now.
ALL PR people need to realise that this industry is about building relationships with people – not trying to sell a single story.
Trying to build a relationship by just shouting a story without introducing yourself first is very lazy, it might work once but you cant rely on it for every time you need to pitch a story.
While I see this whole issue as an 80/20 share of blame (PR/Journalists), journalists need to go some way to make PR people aware of their preferences for contact (IE time, method etc), because an intelligent PR person will learn the style and opinions of a journalist, but that still leaves them without the appropriate contact info.
For the record, I work in PR and love talking to people and building relationships!
I understand all the sentiments expressed and lazy is one word for it but the relentless pushing downwards of tasks to lower cost executives is a key reason for some of these experiences. If you look at a typical press release, hours of work goes into constructing the messaging, writing and editing it. Then on the day people start to think about the list of people they are going to target and what I see is an inexperienced account executive pulling names wholesale off in a rush from a database and blasting it off by email.
The research is crucial but the storing and sharing of these learnings is even more important. A senior AD may know not it not a good idea to spam a blogger with press releases but how is that information passed on in a busy agency environment. A lot of PR companies struggle with managing basic press lists on a database and very few incorporate any sort of preference criteria within it. CRM is widely accepted as key to maintaining relationships with customers but its use for managing media relations is still very primative.
Time for the PR industry to invest in technology.