A few bad apples in PR are in trouble, the lazy ones who pitched press releases straight to Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, have been put on his personal blacklist and hung out to dry in his blog.
Yep, there's a naked list (lacking a "mailto", sadly) of every email address that Chris reckons crossed the line of good PR as they didn't bother to figure out who at Wired should really be getting the release. There are 300+ emails on that list, some from well-known PR companies.
There is no getting off this list. If you're on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.
Ouch, I sense that quite a few PR companies are going to have their own troubles with spam in the future.
I hear what Chris is saying, it never ceases to amaze me how many people use this contact form to ask us how to contact us and where to direct releases, or what our snailmail is. Am I the only one who can see the text on that page? Seriously? Because it is all listed right there! Honestly this is driving me crazy.
If rule #1 of good PR is: Build Relationships, Not Lists. then Rule #2 should be read the god damned contact page.
And if you're too lazy to do that, perhaps you should read Marketingsherpas crash course in how to pitch us in particular, as their assistant editor Irina Missiuro did all the hard work for you.
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Jay Eff craft. What is it about that contact page? People assume that we are Pepsi, Toll House cookie corp, Verizon or whatever other brand name commercial we carry here - and they'll beg for free stuff, complain about ads they dislike (such as the recent Clearasil ones) and whatnot. Honestly, am I the only person that can see the text on that page?
Sorry for the derail, but I do wonder.
As for the banned PR 'spammers' list, I won't be surprised if more bloggers do this. Were getting quite a high noise to signal ratio in our contact email box, but filtering (which I do on server level, never lower as the emails get sent on to several mailboxes) might block a legit adgrunt with a legit question, and the odd decent pitch. This would suck.
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PermalinkI wonder if some people have always been that dumb and lazy, or if email and the internet created more of them.
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