Slashdot Mirror
When Doing PR For Anti-Spam Firm... Don't Spam
netbuzz writes "Rule #1 when doing PR for an antispam vendor: Don't spam. This isn't exactly brain surgery, yet the fellow at a PR agency called Rocket Science managed to violate Rule #1 while attempting to drum up publicity for Singlefin, which provides e-mail, IM and Web filtering services to the likes of Juno and NetZero. He also violated Rules #2 and #3." Given the hundreds of press releases I get in my inbox on a weekly basis, PR folks in general need to learn that lesson regardless of their clients.
Rule#3: spammers are stupid.
I just slam-dunk this all into the bit bin and hit empty.
I'm particularly amused by sp4m which includes [%TO_ADDRESS]
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Parent seems to be on topic -- its spam!
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Actually if you have an anti-spam product, then advertising it by spamming is the perfect strategy.
You'll only reach the customers that need your product.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
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Rocket Science?! Oh, the ironing is delicious...
Dark Reflection
This isn't exactly brain surgery, yet the fellow at a PR agency called Rocket Science managed to violate Rule #1
If it had been rocket science, they may have gotten it right.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
That's great... now the queston is; if you are already a customer would the product block this mail and if so is that blackmail?
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
By the looks of things, only 116 actual mails were sent. In fact... the whole thing is actually just a big chain of fuckups.
When will someone step up and be the hero in this story?
If u cn rd ths email,
You must not be using our products!
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I expected to see an article about a mass-mailing campaign to advertise the firm, but this is just some dope shooting emails randomly at this blogger's company rather than specifically targetting the relevant person.
It's not nearly as bad as the heading and write-up sound. Far from normal connotations of spamming, this falls more under the category of "stupid".
If you haven't foed me yet, what are you waiting for?
Is the second rule "you DO NOT talk about spam"?
I don't see how that would work considering they need to advertise an anti-spam product.
I remember the mass Net Send era.. where people could make/buy programs that did a mass net send command to bulk ip addresses.... Before I turned net send off, I saw a few ad's come up, on programs that disable getting ads like that. All it did was turn the service for net send off, or just run a program to filter it... It was pretty simple, but on the same token, anti-spammers will find themselves violating what they are advertising to fight to get the word out... Its sad...
Just me
Which inbox... your personal or your business one? Your personal one shouldn't get any PR material. But your business one... well, that's just how the world works. Businesses will get mail targeted for what they are doing. That at least is relevant. I have a tad bit more patience for relevant advertising mail than for "be$t CIA1is softabs!" and Rolex replicas.
Press Releases aren't, they're just tedious. And everyone writes them. Even OSDN and OSTG. And considering you are a news source, consider it a blessing that you get press releases; it confirms your relevance. Plus, every once in a while, you'll find one that's actually interesting.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
while i do not work in pr, my degree *clears throat* is in public relations... and if there's one thing our school taught is... learn to question your bosses/managers/clients. i mean, to be an effective pr person, you have to be able to ask questions like "well, gee, sending a spam might not be the best for our reputation."
now, in the case of this particular story -- the pr person who prepared this is just, i believe, a moron. the other thing we were taught in pr is that every news organization has something akin to a "wall of shame." these are places where stupid/poorly written/misdirected/etc. releases get posted for all (in the newsroom) to laugh at. this fact is always a motivator for a pr person to get it right (at least one who wants to do a good job).
included with this is the knowledge that just about every journalst/editor you come across will, of course, have a superior attitude (which i always found funny - because without pr people, journalists would either not get a story or have to do a significant amount of leg work to get it, and well, journalists, also, by and large, are lazy.)
so, with all that in mind, every release has a lot riding on it, and an effective pr person knows this and just doesn't do a half-assed cluster-fuck of a job in writing or distributing releases. pr people are targets. easy targets. highly mis-understood targets, and therefor its up to the pr people to make damn sure they don't make it any easier.
sad robot making broken music
The submitter is "buzz@nww.com"; the article is at networkworld.com. Of course nww.com is just an alias for networkworld.com. I couldn't immediately tell if buzz == Paul McNamara, but it's at least astroturfing for the site.
"Rule #3 when doing PR for an antispam vendor: Don't dis the news editor who writes a blog."And that is where I stopped careing. IT'S A BLOG, people. Less important than the opinion page of a newspaper...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It doesn't take the brains of a rocket scientist to know that you don't send out spam like email when doing anti spam anything.
Specks
Batteries not included
Yes these are cruel times indeed :)
A non spam company needs spam to survive ! HOw ironic !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
I've got a counter of how many times someone says the following:
"Geez, how could this guy fuck up a PR email? It isn't Rocket Science."
Maybe we can get to 50 by lunch.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I wonder how many hits http://www.singlefin.net/ is geting now though. Looks like it worked with slashdot just another free advert.
Don't spam - it's not Rocket Science (TM, Ltd.)
Get your own free personal location tracker
Has the author not heard the phrase "any publicity is good publicity".
People on here seem incedibly naive. It doesn't matter a damn if you don't like the advert or the method of advertising. That's not the point of the advert. The aim is to raise the profile.
The blog posting and subsequent slashdot story are excellent publicity. I'd never heard of the advertising agency or the product. Now I have.
On the other hand, at least everybody who gets the email is definitely in need of anti-spam services :). Think of it as targeted marketing.
Somebody needs a good kick in the goolies, for the sheer stupidity more than anything else.
See? That's got to be a fake! C'mon people, wake up!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
the submission itself is spam.
Notice the odd resemblence between the submitter's URL and the linked story.
I'm impressed. And it didn't even take a blue car.
It wan't a failure. Remember - "The only thinkg worse than bad publicity is NO publicity."
Look at it this way - with 116 emails, the guy has gotten his story onto slashdot as a front-page article. So, who are the 116 people I have to email to get the same treatment?
"Do you hate spam? Like this? So do we, get our product!"
It is akin to a protection money deal, but hey, that's free enterprise!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, maybe it was deliberate? We're all talking about it :-)
How's this different from those companies that sell anti-popup software... by having annoying (re-appearing) popups.
If your Qi is strong they will come.
There is no honor in poking the anti-spam hornet nest with a stick.
And you shirley will be stung.
Rick B.
I would never have heard of these people. Now I have heard of them.
http://spam.abuse.net/bits/igotspam.shtml
2. Sometimes spammers get mad at anti-spammers and send out spam with the anti-spammer's name, address or web site in the spam. This is called a joe-job and some people take it as evidence that they've "arrived" as anti-spammers if someone joe-jobs them. It's done, of course, to try to create trouble for the person being joe-jobbed.
I'd think one of the most important things for a PR firm to do would be to understand who it is they're representing, and what ideals and values the company wants to represent. I mean, come on, this isn't exactly... oh. Nevermind.
-- dR.fuZZo
This submitted story is spam. Consider that the Submitter, Netbuzz, has only twice posted comments (both of which link networkworld.com) and has had 6 stories accepted since April - on top of which, each story features a link to (surprise, surprise) networkworld.com in a section called "buzzblog".
Phishy.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Oddly enough, rules #2 and #3 are "location" and "location".
1. Send email to 116 addresses advertising your spam product /. - Bask in the free publicity (how many /.ers heard the name Singlefin before this?)
2. Get the event posted to
4. ???
4. PROFIT!!!
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
I wonder if the publicist was trying to be funny...
Years ago, before spam filters and very serious spam problems, friends of mine sent emails with subjects like "Make Money Fast" or "hot nekkid chiks". Ho ho ho, how very droll we thought.
Then fairly recently when spam started to show basic programmers errors like "Dear %name_of_recipient" I also got this deliberately typed into emails as yet another sly dig at the morons at the bottom of the programming food chain trying and failing to emit randomised english text.
So I can't help wondering if this publicist was just trying to get a laugh out of prospective customers - the first reaction is "more godamm spam" but the real message is "Tired of this sh1t? We can help". It's a theory anyway.
Remember the Far Side cartoon where the fellow picks up a brick that has been chucked into his front room with the message: "Bricks through your window? Call Al's Glass...."?
Oh yea, Network World. For years, I had one of their free subscriptions. I don't know how I signed up for it (I highly suspect that they got my address off of a list, however, I might have signed up for it), but I had it for years. Once in a while I looked at it, but mostly it just helped fill my mailbox. Every once in a while they sent me a survey, which I never answered. Finally one day I got what amounted to a 'threatening letter' from them saying that I needed to fill out the survey. I say 'threatening' because it wasn't nice, and frankly it vaguely reminded me of a collection letter (I used to see a few of those). Fortunately, as promised they finally stopped sending me their never wanted magazine.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
You ever see those real estate signs "If you lived here, you would be home now!"? This guy is using the same logic, you send out a load of spam that says "If you had our appliance, you wouldn't be reading this now!"
Actually no, Paul McNamara at NetworkWorld wrote it. The submission is simply cut-and-pasted from the first paragraph of the article. If you're going to just digg, at least attribute.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I tried using their email forwarding service about a year and a half ago, and then cancelled my account. Since then, I've been getting "Bigfoot Anti-Spam" newsletters and other random ads from them on my cell phone (and I get to pay for the messages!). Their customer service did absolutely nothing when I emailed them.
Oh, and the messages come from randomly generated @news.bigfoot.com addresses, so there's no way to block them with my cell service provider (which only blocks specific addresses). Hmm, could this be... SPAM?
When I wrote the Piratefish last Christmas, I gave it away then and I still do. All I relied on was google and yahoo searches, the occasional blog entry. It's had over 1000 downloads since then. Now my latest version is finished - just days ago, and I've sent out just one message to let people know that the latest version is available for sale - and that's all I'll sen I used a list server, I didn't go over-fancy with the mailing, and I even gave the early registering users a good deal on it too. "Rocket Science" eh? Not!
It's not appropriate to call sending a press release to a news site "spam", because it is *not* unsolicited. Every news site/paper has a submission policy for submitting PR, and actively encourages all relevant industry players to send press releases.
The incompetent individual who sent the PR did not pay attention to the press release submission policy, and he didn't know how to properly address e-mail or stroke journalist egos. However, he was sending a *solicited* e-mail to apropriate individuals. And, as pointed out before, he did actually succeed in getting publicity not only for his client, but for his PR firm, which has a catchy enough name for some people to remember.
Okay, so he's and idjut, but he isn't a spammer by even the broadest definition.