I've wrote too many times to link that one of the best things about the Internet is that is gives people a platform to expose excellence and awfulness. For the business world, great products and services get open, honest reviews and lots of links; while poor service and quality are quickly exposed. These rewards and punishments in the market of Internet public opinion are serving as a driver of improvement.
An interesting example this week comes from The Long Tail blog. Author Chris Anderson, who is also an Editor at Wired magazine, blogged about his anger at Public Relations people who "spam" him with irrelevant and unpersonalized story pitches. In his blog he takes the extreme step of listing the actual emails of people who have given him crappy pitches over the past 30 days. Anderson then writes: "If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play."
The interesting thing to me is that "being harvested by spammers" is the least negative impact that this post lead to. I believe the real damage is that this post is exposing a list of PR people who are doing a poor job. If you look at the list, it's not a bunch of fake emails from spammers, but actually several real names from brand-name PR agencies. This post will be noticed by their bosses, and will be out there for Google to find whenever they are looking for a job.
Anderson's punishment might be a tad too harsh. Maybe he should have issued a warning first. On the other hand, if people are free to spam him with press releases, they should know that there always could be a negative reaction. There is no free lunch or pitch.
I'm sure that those of us in PR or marketing who read this post will think about this story before we reach out to editors and/or bloggers again. And the folks on the list may have gotten feedback that will make them more effective going forward. Challenge leads to improvement once again.
UPDATE: Chris Anderson's post has something like 300 comments at this point. And there's a bit of a PR agency "war" going on. An agency not on the list targeted an agency with several people on the list. You can read it all here. Seth Godin also has a nice point or two.
Comments