Category: General

PR spam and RSS

In the comments on my post regarding PR e-mail, Jeremy is concerned about his press releases getting caught in spam filters. 

One quick way to check whether your press release will probably get through, is to use a free online service called spamcheck:

Send your press release to: spamcheck@sitesell.net

Put the word “TEST” at the beginning of the subject line and you’ll get an automated response in a couple of minutes rating the “spam-content” of your press release!

Also Tate asks if there are any good resources for illustrating the benefits of RSS to journalists.

I don’t know of any specific resources.  I include our RSS feed in my e-mail signature and at the bottom of our press releases, I’ve had some good feedback from journalists on both.

There are a number of good media stories on the benefits of RSS which may help:

I’d be interested to hear other PR people’s experiences “selling” RSS….

 

This is the best PR campaign I've ever seen…

I am being inundated with e-mail.  Spam seems to be increasing even with clever server-side and desktop-based anti-spam agents, I’m sure it’s the same for everyone.

Picking through my spam folder and trying to identify legitimate e-mail is becoming a more difficult task.  I’ve written about this before, but the subject line of your e-mail is critical.  If you want a journalist, analyst or business contact to open the message, particularly when they don’t know you very well, the subject line could well be the deciding factor.

Already this week, I’ve had calls from people following up their e-mails where I deleted their message, not because I wasn’t interested but because I assumed it was spam. In PR we focus on trying to write tight, punchy e-mails that capture someone’s interest up front.  But how much time do we spend on the subject line?

Also, I’m interested in people’s thoughts on press release subject lines. (Shock! Horror! I still send press releases via e-mail – and the wires, and RSS*….) I have come to the conclusion that if you’re sending a press release to a journalist that’s relevant and timely it makes most sense to be up front about the content of the message by placing “PR:” at the beginning of the subject line.  Feedback on this practice has been positive so far, after all there’s no point trying to pretend your e-mail is something it isn’t.  Does anyone have any thoughts on it?

*One last point about RSS for delivering information. We’ve been offering Press Release feeds over RSS for a long time so it’s an area I know something about. Some advocates of RSS have declared that with RSS there’s no longer a need to send press releases (and I know they’re dead… really I do..) via e-mail. I think that’s rubbish. That is the 1995 equivalent of saying: “I’ve put the press release up on the website so everyone will read it”.  RSS will ultimately become a primary medium for news dissemination, but we’ll still need e-mail.  Over time as more people adopt and monitor RSS feeds then the need for e-mail will be reduced but that will take time and you’ll still have to reach out to people who don’t know your firm or its products.  From talking to many of the thought leaders in the RSS area there are a number of very interesting developments taking place in terms of extending the reach of RSS and those developments will accelerate it’s adoption.

Footnote:

Footnote 2:

In the course of a talk I was giving last weekend to PR students, I polled the room to see how many of them were aware of blogs.  To my surprise nearly half the room had read or heard of blogs which is a huge increase over my last random poll.

Blogging about PR blogs blogging about blogging.

Pete Shinbach asks the question: “Why are PR bloggers so anal?”.

It’s a valid question….

“Why are PR bloggers so obsessed with blogging? I was thinking about this the other day when I noticed that just about every PR blog post I saw was about blogging. I use two newsreaders — one that just scoops up everything and one that’s set to be a tad more discriminating.”

It’s something I discussed the other day. There is a disproportionate amount of blogging about blogging among the PR community.

I include myself in that.

In my own case I think it’s laziness.  Limited time, RSS, loads of online content equals disproportionate volumes of posting on blogs.  The man we should be taking the lead from of course is Jim Horton, who primarily posts pure PR and his posts are both interesting and challenging. [Mr. Edelman also deserves an honorable mention]

So, I am going to make an effort on this front. I’m not mad on the whole blog echo chamber in any case.  I’ll still cover blogging when it’s relevant, but will make an effort to extend beyond the subject where possible.

Maybe I’ll put my RSS reader down for a couple of days and invest some of that saved time into trying to enable my TrackBack system for the fifth time…

 

A bunny is not just for Easter…

Well well well, UK PR gossip mongerer Spin Bunny* has been shut down. I’m not involved in the UK PR scene but I must admit I enjoyed Spin Bunny’s critical reviews of the various goings on.

The sad thing is that this was inevitable.  Spin Bunny was making fun of the world’s most control-centric business, eventually one of the firms was going to take action and as usual they’ve used the legal system to cloak their identity.

More from DrewB, Neville Hobson, Stuart Bruce and the Bunny’s most amusing online adversary Chris Lewis – at least Chris engaged in dialogue unlike others I could mention.

* Don’t fret if the link doesn’t work, for some reason I could never get access to the site via the Web only through bloglines or my RSS reader.

Mr. Emperor… I think you're in the nude…

Ephraim Schwartz over at Infoworld has an interesting column on blogging.  The column was inspired by a recent media alert from IT consulting firm, Sapient, where their CTO, Ben Gaucherin, was quoted in a media alert entitled �Blog tech doesn�t live up to blog talk, according to Sapient CTO.�

Now taking a contrary view is always good for column inches, and Mr. Gaucherin’s comments that “blogs are the digital equivalent of the pet rock” are certainly a welcome change to the prevalent view that blogs will take over the world.

Unfortunately for Mr. Gaucherin I think he’s missing the point a little.  If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll know that  I don’t believe that blogs will take over the world but I obviously don’t subscribe to Mr. Gaucherin’s view either.  As always in these situations the truth lie somewhere in the middle.

However, this pronouncement is a brave step in view of the potential backlash he may have to put up with, and in his defence we should all be re-examining the ‘new new thing’ on a regular basis to make sure we’re not lost in the Internet’s echo chamber.

So it’s not that the emperor is in the nude, it’s just his new clothes aren’t quite as impressive as he thinks….