| Recent
Articles |
I Also Oneself Something Would Want To Find Out...
The headline on this post is the first of two lines from a comment posted last
night to something I wrote months ago. The full comment reads...
Anonymous Comments Are Now a Federal Offense
According to this
post from Jeff Jarvis, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting
annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail...
The Robot Generation - Crawlers Prevail!
In the pursuit of online power, manipulation, and control, a new breed of web
crawler's hiding in the dark alleys of the web are being brought forth. A new
breed of crawler's are coming to a site near you!
One Man's Victory Over Spam
A UK businessman found unwanted messages in his inbox, so he turned to a European
Union law that permits claiming damages from the spammers in court. Media Logistics
UK will fork...
|
|
|
|
|
01.13.06
Self-policing
PR: Should We Out PR Spammers?
 By
Shel Holtz
There are scads of approaches we can take to rehabilitate the image of the public
relations profession.
One of them is self-policing. This can be handled by the associations that represent
the profession (should they ever decide to put teeth in their ethics policies)
or by individual practitioners. I like the idea of speaking up-I've done some
of it myself on this blog and in my podcast.
But I'm a bit troubled by Jim
Horton's modest proposal.
Jim
is one of the smartest PR guys I know and his blog is one of the more thoughtful
(dare I say cerebral?) among those in the PR blogging space. He was also blogging
about PR before there were blogs; he may be the very first to have used the web
to articulat his thoughts on the profession. (His blog-and the website the preceded
it before blogging software was available, is tellingly titled "Online Public
Relations Thoughts.") Recently, Jim was spammed with a press release that had
something to do with fashion magazines and supermodels. I don't think Jim has
ever written about anything remotely close to these topics. Irriitated by the
clueless pitch, he makes this recommendation:
Whenever a PR firm
spams any PR blogger, we out the firm in our blogs and brand them with a Scarlet
S for spammer. I propose that this first S go to the firm that sent the nonsensical
release to me today...Maybe if they are shamed enough in public, offenders will
change their ways. Jim figures:
If PR cannot discipline its own, who can? Reporters have bitched for years about
misdirected releases and pitches they get by the pound every day. It's time then
for PR bloggers to stand together and to stop this stupidity before it overwhelms
our own mailboxes.
Turn Key Reseller Web Hosting -
Host UNLIMITED
sites!
He then names the culprit who sent the offending press release.
Theoretically, this is a good idea. However, the idea of putting negative comments
about a named agency or practitioner into the blogosphere without some fact-checking
seems dangerous. That's exactly what
Jeremy Zawodny did when he received what he perceived to be a spammed press
release. Only after he posted his accusation did the president of the agency respond
that it was, in fact, a mistake, and that her agency has a firm stand against
spamming. Even the agency's client came to their defense, arguing that the agency
was one of the savviest high-tech agencies operating in Silicon Valley. Zawodny
ultimately changed the headline of his post because it appeared in the top 10
Google results when searching on the agency's name. In other words, this single
blog post branded an ethical agency as a spammer even though they weren't, and
without the headline change, that association would have continued into the far
distant future. (Here's my original
post about the incident.)
I'd therefore propose a slight adjustment to Jim's suggestion: Let's go ahead
and out spamming PR agencies, but only after checking our facts to verify that
what looks like spam actually is.
About the Author:
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. |
