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”
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.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
