Day: August 29, 2002

When Spamming your customers is acceptable….why PR people gets LOADS of spam
OK I lied, spam is never acceptable. But I have had the most amazing e-mail exchange with one of my suppliers. The supplier in question (I am in two minds about naming them) spams me semi-regularly.

I got sick of it and sent them an e-mail informing them that as we are a customer I don’t appreciate my company receiving three or four spams ata time pushing their services (that we already pay for). The response I got left me speechless…

>”I am sorry for your inconvenience with our email solicitation. I
> will speak with our CEO about your issue, but am not sure that it can easily
> be stopped. You see, this isn’t a email list driven campaign, where we can
> simply take a name/address off of a list. This campaign basically captures
> press releases that are issued on the internet, and attaches itself to the
> release and sends our message back to the sending Party. As such, I’m not
> sure that we can identify in advance of who is or is not a Client and stop
> the process.”

So I e-mailed him back saying that wasn’t acceptable, then I got this priceless reply:

>”Tom: I completely understand! It’s just that with this kind of novel
>approach to soliciting new Clients, am just not sure that I can easily stop
>the monster that we have created. When we usually grab things off the
>Internet, I’m not sure that we can program the spider to differentiate
>between who is or isn’t a Client.”

Can you believe they are this open about spam? My most recent e-mail has informed him that if I recieve one more piece of unsolicited e-mail from him I will be reporting them to SpamCop. Unbelievable, but it explains why putting your e-mail on a press release/web site/ newsletter is a recipe for spam of the e-mail kind. Want to know the culprit?

On a related matter check out spamgourmet for some disposable e-mail addresses and it seems fax.com has been hit with a $2.2 trillion lawsuit for junk faxes.

Going once, going twice…..
Thanks to Kevin Dugan who passed on this interesting link. Pittsburgh-based PR firm, Rose, Stein & Associates, Inc., have gone onto eBay to auction “15 minutes of fame”. A PR package that includes “a strategy briefing…wardrobe makeover…media trainer…personal press kit…photo shoot…personal publicist” and most interesting of all “guaranteed exposure to at least two million people”. Conditions for the auction include that you’ve no criminal background. So far there have been 36 bids and it’s up to $1,776, unfortunately not yet reaching the reserve. But with eight days to go, who knows. I’ll keep you updated on progress!

A shamless plug… GoogleMail
Last month I gave GoogleMail as an example of promoting something via Blogs. GoogleMail is a Web Service we created that enables you to do a Google search via e-mail (Simply send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with your search terms in the subject line). The only promotion of GoogleMail was via Blogs, no media outreach, no newswires.

The results have been impressive with over 100 blogs referencing GoogleMail. One of the more techie sites completely dissed GoogleMail and created a hailstorm of heated discussion. In the meantime over 30,000 people have used the service and last week the New York Times ran a story on GoogleMail based on the coverage from the blogs.

GoogleMail was a pet project that I believe has proved that communications is changing and many would say for the better! One word of caution however, while I believe blogs provide a powerful medium, I also believe that as more PR people try and influence them there is going to be some trouble…..blogs can be very personal affairs… so be careful out there and remember the basics of good communication never change.