Call for PR email blacklist should be a wake-up call

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On his blog, Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo asks for an email blacklist of tech-oriented PR agencies. “I get so damned much spam (I mean “pitches") that I’m starting to think that life would be better if I just blocked email from all the big names in Tech PR,” Zawodny complains. He doesn’t even want to omit the domains of PR agencies Yahoo works with, like Voce. Most of the comments offer advice on how to set up such a list. One journalist commented that he wouldn’t mind taking advantage of it and offers a short list as a starter.

It may seem, at first blush, that Zawodny is joining the anti-PR meme spreading through the blogosphere (e.g., Russell Beattie’s idiotic rant). Some of these assaults, though, are justified. I don’t personally know anybody who sends massive numbers of press releases and pitches via email to everybody on a generic distribution list, but I know the practice exists and is widely used. Zawodny isn’t alone in dreading the amount of email spewing forth from PR agencies. Before he left the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor let it be known that he was giving up on email altogether because of the deluge of pitches and releases swamping his in-box. If you wanted to pitch him, he said, let him subscribe to your RSS feed.

The practitioners who apply this shotgun approach to getting ink are damaging the profession. There are thousands of clued-in PR professionals who would target a journalist (or an influential blogger like Zawodny) only after doing his homework and determining that the reporter and the story are a good match. A blacklist would catch all those legitimate queries in the same filter as the “pitch spam.” Not only would the pitch never reach the target, but the journalist could miss a story in which he’s actually interested.

It’s not just Zawodny. Steve Lubetkin points to a post from Boston Heard reporter Brett Arends attacking US PR shops, and notes that PR people are circling the wagons when they should be paying close attention to Arends’ complaint.:

Nearly ever day I find myself staring at the telephone handset in disbelief after dealing with yet another example of “Podunk PR”

• Press offices that don’t return calls - from a daily newspaper - for four days. And are then surprised to find that the story has come and gone.
• Media teams that can’t confirm basic facts about their company.
• Media offices where everyone has left by 4:51 pm on a big news day.

This sort of stuff would be a disciplinary offense in any decent public relations office in the U.K.

But it’s amazingly common over here. And it isn’t just Boston. It’s true in New York and elsewhere.

The response from the PR community to Arends’ complaint is to point the finger at the media, recalling all those reporters who never returned calls. But the problem is real. Arends notes, “There are many good public relations people around, people who are professional, hard-working, competent, helpful and friendly.” But these are not enough to prevent him from forming a generally negative perception of PR.

If we, as a profession, wish these online attacks would stop, then we have to do something about cleaning our own house. We have tolerated the worst practices of public relations long enough. Enough bad PR from the highly visible minority of practitioners who engage in it will result in more blacklists, more reporters who dismiss agencies and turn to alternate sources. Without any influence, why would clients hire agencies?

In the book Enterprise One-to-One, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers suggest that complaints are a company’s best feedback. By listening to complaints, companies can focus on fixing problems that make a genuine difference to customers. It’s time for the PR profession to listen to these online complaints so we can fix what is hurting our image. We can dismiss those that are just plain stupid, of course (such as the assertion that no PR is really necessary when blogs alone will do the trick). But torrents of unwanted press releases and PR offices that don’t return calls? These are things we should do something about.

While the profession cannot force individual practitioners or companies to improve their behaviors, we can take some steps:

• Our professional associations, notably IABC and PRSA, can undertake awareness and education campaigns to create highlight the practices that are besmirching the profession.
• Both associations can try to put some teeth in their ethics policies so that they are more than documents trotted out at conferences.
• We PR bloggers can advocate more strongly for the best practices clients and journalists deserve. (Has anybody thought of a PR bloggers association to advocate for best practices?)

There’s more we can do, no doubt. But if PR is to survive and thrive in this transparent world in which we exist, we need to get the low-rent practitioners to clean up their act.

1. The challenge is that you cannot teach people to be curious - if they feel they don’t want to learn any more about their company, it seems they get away with it. The worst case of sheer bloody mindedness came from one of the two satellite radio companies (not XM) who refused point blank to arrange an interview to camera. I have had that before - but the reason got to me...we are not interested in talking to people from Europe, it is not in our interests, so we’ll take a pass on that one. All this after a string of broken promises for info. This was PR at its worst.

   Posted by Jonathan Marks  on  07/20  at  03:34 AM

2. Putting teeth into association ethics policies (which in reality are only nice sounding platitudes for all the good they do) is a good suggestion.  However, I wonder (i.e. doubt) if they really have the stomach for it.

   They could yank a practicioners membership but I doubt that the “pitch spammers” would care or are even members in the first place. What they could do, however, is serve as industry watchdogs and censure violators.  Here is how I see this might work:

   1. Journalists like Zawodny could make a complaint and provide the association background information (instructions of which could be housed on the associations web site)

   2. Association ethics guardians review submitted materials, interview the journalist and if complaint is deemed valid contact the practioner and/or their superiors. This contact/conversation would be to inform them that their practice has run counter to association codes of conduct, is harmful to the profession and is generally counterproductive.

   3. Association could then provide education and/or invite practicioner to attend training in effective online PR.

   4. However, association also informs practitioner that if they repeat the offense they will be by placed in censure by the association which will a) revoke their membership or accreditation - as well as anyone else in their firm/company b) prohibit the practicioner or anyone else from their firm/company from being granted membership for a period of time (2 years?) if no further violations occur and c) publicize that they have been censured by the association.

   5. If practicioner/firm repeats the offense the association implements the items of censure outlined above. This could even be accompanied by an official notice going to the top officer in the firm or corporate parent.

   If the industry really wants to address this problem than all associations should adopt this practice and honor it (IOW, a censured PRSA member shouldn’t be allowed to join IABC and vice versa).

   While this action probably won’t deter those who aren’t members or who don’t give a whit about professonalism, the threat of publicity could give them pause. I mean if you were going to hire a PR firm, or an employee, would you want to hire one that received this black mark or another who is in the industry’s good standing?

   Some won’t care one way or another. But short of licensing nothing is going to have any affect as long as the associations sit on their hands and make excuses why their ethics policies can’t be enforced.

   At least this approach, or something like it, puts some weight and validity behand all these association claims of being the “preeminent this or that” for the profession.

   But you want to lay any odds on what the response from the associations will be about an approach like this? I can already hear the excuses forming....

   Posted by Craig Jolley  on  07/20  at  05:15 AM

3. The most interesting aspect of Zawodny’s complaint wasn’t in his post but in one of his replies to a comment to the post.  The PR spam he’s having problems with isn’t going to his work e-mail address but to his personal e-mail address.  That’s like those lowlife telemarketers who interrupt your dinner to sell you heaven-knows-what.  They, like the PR idiots who send pitches to a reporter’s personal e-mail address, should not be allowed to breed.

   Posted by Pete Shinbach  on  07/20  at  05:39 AM

4. Going to the professional associations is probably a non-starter. I’m not a member of PRSA or IABC and have reason to join either, as many others I suspect who see the price tag and have no agency to sponsor them.

   We - and by we I mean the press, the PR folks and most of all the PR bloggers - need to move beyond the ‘PR Morons’ meme and start coming up with some best practices and promulagating them quickly.

   We also need to start naming names. When I did work in agencies I made it a point to publically humilate anyone I caught sending attachments to a reporter. I don’t see why we shouldn’t be doing the same now. The power of blogging and Google juice should be able to create enough of a public record that some of the worst offenders are forced to clean up their acts.

   Posted by David Parmet  on  07/20  at  09:09 AM

5. I’ve always thought that we could take a leaf out of the book of the UK’s TPS (Telephone Preference Service). Why not have a MPS (Media Preference Service) where journalists and bloggers could register their preferences about what kind of stories they want to receive and in what way (email, fax, RSS, etc.)?

   If enough journalists signed up, then the responsible PR agencies would be forced to take it seriously and honour these preferences (much as the responsible telemarketers do in the UK now).

   Posted by Niall Cook  on  07/20  at  10:41 PM

6. great post, shel. you provide great recommendations for those of us who actually care about thsi profession and work hard to represent it with integrity.  Black lists of any kind are silly.  PR pros could do the same for ignorant journalists - or product marketing types.  It doesn’t help the problem.  It is still our responsibility - those who care - to do the job well and seperate ourselves from the flacks.

   Posted by matthew podboy  on  08/03  at  02:17 PM