PR spam – it’s tricky, it’s a losing battle but education is needed

If there is one issue that is almost guaranteed to raise its head every month or so, it is PR spam. I’m sure it has always been thus and I’m sure it will continue to be…

Yesterday, Business Zone editor Dan Martin blogged about a couple of PRs that pitched irrelevant information to him, failing to realise that his specialism was small businesses. At almost the same time, I saw tweets from journalists Sally Whittle and Adrian Bridgwater similarly moaning about pitches they had also recently received.

Dan mentions the Inconvenient PR Truth campaign that Real Wire launched earlier in the year. At the time, I resisted the temptation to blog about the campaign as I wasn’t really sure about my reaction to both the issue and the campaign itself.

But, I’ve been mulling it all over and think there are three key points worth making. I also think the comparison with other marketing genres is interesting and pertinent for example, email marketing – another area where spam is seen to be a big problem.

1. Pitching isn’t always as easy as it might seem – I’m prepared to get slated here, but pitching and targeting isn’t always as easy as it might seem. Media databases and distribution services (like Real Wire) in many ways make it seem too easy for PRs, but they also make us lazy. Factor in the pressure from colleagues and clients to get results and you have a situation where sending out press releases to a distribution list is as simple as a click of a button. This isn’t targeting. Targeting is much much harder and takes a lot of research and understanding. This isn’t an excuse, it is a recognition that this is a specialist technique that needs care and attention. It’s the same with email marketing; it’s easy to blast out an email to a distribution list, but it is much harder to segment your list based on user behaviour, it takes time. And the fact with both is that taking the care and effort will always bring better results.
2. Spam will always exist - many journalists rely on PR a lot (as a PR, you quickly get to know the publications and journalists that will simply copy and paste anything they are given!). That’s not to say they should just suck it up and cope with it, but there will inevitably be good and bad PRs (like there are good and bad journalists). This will never change. Similarly there will always be companies that spam using email marketing, it’s one of those things that are annoying but we just have to get on and deal with.
3. Education is vital - combining both these points, there is a genuine need for education in the industry, to promote best practice. We work with an email marketing company that works tirelessly with organisations like the Direct Marketing Association amongst others to promote best practice. I don’t think the same is really true in the PR industry and I’m not sure that it was an outcome of the Inconvenient Truth campaign, but perhaps should have been.

Conclusion: let’s be positive

So what is the answer? I genuinely think there is an opportunity for the industry as a whole, perhaps in combination with journalists, to share positive examples of how this process should work from a best practice standpoint. We are all quick to talk from lofty, strategic positions, but when do we ever talk about more tactical processes? Journalists too are quick to complain about bad practices, but if we don’t ever hear about good examples, how are those lower down in agencies or in-house meant to learn.

Yes, this should probably all happen internally to an extent, but it obviously isn’t happening everywhere so, as an industry, don’t we have a responsibility to share and learn together?

picture credit

Danny Whatmough