Category: General

More on PR Spam-gate (last post on this..)

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…

Are PR people arrogant about Web 2.0?

Damien Mulley has posted a very interesting and thought provoking comment on my post regarding PR spam.

I think it raises some interesting points….

The sheer arrogance from PR people on this matter speaks volumes. If what you’re pitching is so important to this blogger then shouldn’t they be coming to you?

Just because you have done some research and you are now highly targeting someone does not mean it’s not spam. It’s targeted spam. See? Still spam. It’s also a bit arrogant, yes you worked harder for that pitch, your work has value but it’s rich if you think you deserve respect and airtime from a stranger just because you worked hard.

Would you walk up to someone that just gave a speech and shove a press release into their hand or would you introduce yourself, say what you do, hand over a card and ask permission about sending something to them that may interest them?

Don’t pitch if you contact a blogger, ask can you pitch and explain why the pitch could be of value. No sell at all in an initial email/intro. “Hey Gina, this is what you do, this is what we do, any interest if *I* send you on some stuff from time to time or maybe you can dip in and out of my blog where I talk about these things?”

 

So PR community. What’s your view?

Update:

Jeremy Pepper makes a similar point.

The PR spam victims bite back… and the response…

Bad or irrelevant PR pitches are nothing new. 

Many of us, in our more quiet moments, will admit to probably not investing the time and effort we should have from time to time (a long time ago obviously 🙂 ). 

The key thing is to remember your mistake and learn from it. 

We’re seeing more journalists and bloggers publishing lists of PR firms they are blacklisting. [Ref: Chris Anderson last October]

Now a guy called Matt Haughey is doing something similar as has Gina Trapani.

See here and the PR Spammers Wiki for more details.

(For the more evil minded among you, although it’s a Wiki, you won’t be able to edit it without the right log-in.  You could always ask, but I get the feeling you won’t get a favourable hearing 🙂 )

Todd Defren, whose firm is on the list, has posted an “open post” (I am assuming that’s the correct blog equivalent…) to Gina.

I like it.  It’s conversational.

Brian Solis, whose firm is also on the list takes a different tack. (I have to admit I came away thinking about meat more than anything else and I’m not sure that was the objective!)

I hope that before any “holier than thou” PR person starts to crow, they stop and realize that we all live in greenhouses on this matter.

We should strive for best practice, reinforce the right and wrong way to communicate (online and offline) and reflect that sometimes mistakes happen, and sometimes people are more or less forgiving.

That’s not to say that I am adopting a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance on this matter.  To be honest, even this little blog receives a lot of “PR” pitches that don’t make the mark.

If you’re going to engage online, then for the love of jebus do some research.  That’s what Internet browsers and search engines are for…

On a related note, Alice Marshall offers some advice on the importance of being proactive before an issue arises rather than hiring shady companies to try and out rank negative blog posts.

Hear hear…

 

Web 2.0 needs to move towards quality…

I was catching up on my RSS and podcasts consumption when I found myself getting very stressed.

Listening to “For Immediate Release” (Episode #341) there was a listener comment from Mitch Joel, who raised the issue of how are we supposed to manage all this information, links, networks etc.

Mitch used Twitter as an illustration:

Currently, if you look at my Twitter profile page, there are 1577 followers, while I’m following only 545 people. It used to be the same number, but I’ve become a bit of a Twitter Snob. I found it increasingly difficult to follow many different topics of conversation from people I did not know, who were talking to (or about) other people I did not know on topics that were of no immediate interest to me.

It’s a real problem. 

For most people* all this stuff is in addition to the “day job”.

The growth in smeedia content from blogs, to RSS, Twitter, social networking etc. hasn’t, in most cases, been accompanied by a growth in the tools and technologies to manage that content.

Success is often portrayed as connecting to thousands of people or having thousands of people connect to you.  But the noise generated from these connections can also make them practically value-less.

Conversation is a term often bandied about concerning Web 2.0.  But conversation isn’t about trying to hold or understand the commentary of 25,000 people.

Often volume is the most lauded feature. Don’t get me wrong, volume has its place.  But I do find that the work generated by trying to manage Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. can be stressful and have a questionable ROI.

I think there is an ROI – which is why I continue to dip in and out, but volume isn’t everything (or the only thing).

For me, this proves we’re still at the early stages here and we’ve a long way to go.

There seems to be no end of individuals and organisations being able to ship volumes of content online, where it becomes compelling is where we get the tools to be able to mine, identify and use that data.

We’ll get there….

Footnote:

*This statement is not based on any fact or published research.  It is a rash generalisation – but it’s mine 🙂

 

New to me: Live News Cameras

Andrew Finlayson, news director at Fox News Chicago, dropped me (and I’m sure many others 🙂 ) an e-mail regarding a new project from a group of journalists in Chicago:

http://www.livenewscameras.com/

The concept is pretty simple you can watch streaming news footage from different TV stations live on the web.

You can choose to grab streaming from the US and around the world.  I jumped straight to RTÉ and watched the incoming Irish government cabinet receiving their seals of office. 

Good performance and quality (the streaming, not the cabinet 🙂 ), I also checked BBC World, Sky News UK, Sky News Australia.

Really interesting resource for tracking global news.

 image

From their About page:

LiveNewsCameras.com brings together the resources of journalists around the world and makes live streaming video easy to find and use on your computer.

As of today, there are nearly 150 channels of live streaming video here – that number is growing every day.

You can preview what is on any given stream just by leaving the site open on your desktop – many of the thumbnail images will refresh automatically every minute or so.