The PR Society of America responds to my email policy

The PRSA sent this response to my post requesting that PR clean up its industry.

Notionally, we support this call to action, as we do any effort that helps advance the public relations profession. However, PRSA's main mission as a membership organization is professional development and education. We have focused our efforts and resources on providing our members and the broader public relations industry with ethical guidance, best practices and resources that help them perform their jobs ethically, rather than engaging in punitive measures for those who fall afoul. To that end, there are laws that address the mass sending of commercial e-mails, but PRSA is not set up as a legislative body.

Since 1950, PRSA has had a Code of Ethics that reflects the differences between right and wrong in the profession, and it is routinely updated to address modern challenges and concerns affecting the media, public relations professionals, the public, businesses and various other publics that are impacted by public relations. You may have seen our recently unveiled Social Media Policy, part of which offers our members and the broader profession best practices concerning blogger relations.

Our mission is not to kick people out of PRSA for ethical lapses. Using ethical missteps as educational tools is far more beneficial from our point of view.  

Arthur Yann, APR

Vice President of Public Relations

Public Relations Society of America

I understand the PRSA's stance. But its code of ethics lacks two tenets that I'd like to see:

1. PR people should carefully target emails to groups interested in their clients products, services, and ideas.
2. PR people are responsible for maintaining a list of people who have requested to be removed from mailings, and should not email people on that list.

And I wish someone (and politically, it appears it's not the PRSA) would certify this.

PR professionals -- clean up your industry

by Josh Bernoff

In the 1970s, the Ad Council created the Keep America Beautiful campaign, featuring the iconic actor Iron Eyes Cody in Native American garb, shedding a tear as people littered along the highways.

What that campaign changed was people's attitudes about littering. Before that, people thought, what difference does it make if I throw a can out the window? Aftwards, people realized it was wrong. If somebody in your car was going to litter, you might say "Hey, don't do that, keep America beautiful." The littering didn't all stop, but the violators at least felt some guilt.

In this post, I'm hoping some PR professionals who are cutting corners will get the message -- and the rest of you will shame them into better behavior. This is not just about the sad state of pitch relevance. The message here is simpler: you need a system to remove people from your email lists. "What's one email?" I'm sure some are thinking. "What you're asking is time consuming," you might complain. But remember, the people you are targeting are influencers. We can and will point out your flaws, as I am about to do. Yes, I want you to feel guilty. And furthermore, I want the PR Society of America to create a certification for responsible PR emailers, and withhold certification from violators. We need to get people on the wrong side of this to feel some pain, and some guilt.

Here are some examples of recent violations in my inbox (which has not improved at all from the last time I did this).

Seagate sends me an analyst newsletter every month. Four years ago, when was I was covering digital video recorders like TiVo, I cared about the hard drives in them, but now I don't. Seagate's newsletter includes an unsubscribe email address. I emailed it faithfully each month, and received a 2 page email in return describing in technical detail how the email had bounced. 

After repeated attempts to reach Seagate including a few nasty Twitter messages, I reached David Szabados in Seagate PR. He explains "Unfortunately neither of [the people doing this newsletter] had any idea about the alias e-mail, which leads me to believe that it was setup as part of a template, but the follow through on activation of the e-mail never occurred. ... Again, perhaps the e-mail was a placeholder, but obviously it's not correct and finished." This surprised me since Seagate is a large, respected Silicon Valley company that should know better.

Other companies just can't seem to make my deletion from their lists permanent. GlassPoint, a green technology company, sends me a nice note to confirm when I unsubscribe, then blithely sends their newsletter the next month. Laura Borgstede, CEO of the PR Firm Calysto Communications, send me her "PR Vibes" newsletter regularly -- she told me it is "an altruistic effort that Calysto provides to the communications industry." She took me off her her list, but then the newsletter reappeared a few months later.This is a good example of the root of the challenge -- PR companies buy lists, but don't always check to see if removed people are on those lists.

The worst case of this may be Allen & Caron. Michael Lucarelli from Allen & Caron regularly sent me emails that made it clear they thought I was a financial analyst who could pump up their companies. I've made fun of these emails publicly at conferences and ask to be removed from their list, but sure enough, the emails started appearing again. When I contacted Lucarelli about this post, his response was quite revealing: he (1) gave me instructions on how to block him as a sender and (2) requested that Thomson Reuters, which must be where they get my name, remove me from their database. (He also blocked further emails from me-- apparently it's OK for them to email me, but not for me to email him about their policies.) The clear implication is that his emails to me are my problem, not his, and that Allen & Caron is not responsible for maintaining a list of people not to email. I find this reprehensible. No responsible company should work with an agency that behaves in this.

People -- unless you have a system that can not only take somebody off your list but keep them off, you are not a PR person -- you are an amateur. "We pull a list from Cision and you were on it" is not an excuse. I don't want to get out of the Cision list, most people actually use it properly. I am asking to be removed from you. You are responsible for not emailing me again.

Worst of all, though, are PR companies who spray, pray, and don't care. For a PR company to stand out here, it has to be repeat violator. Here's one: 5WPR. 5WPR is "one of the 25 largest PR companies in the U.S." according to its Web site, but their specialty appears to be broad, untargeted mailings. I received all of the following press releases from them (my comments in brackets):

• Breaking Announcement: Independent Gaming Developer Adds Leading Technology Recruiter to Growing Team [Hint: hiring a recruiter is not a "breaking announcement.]
• New Trends in Social Media Technology // Expert Available [News flash: analysts don't generally seek out "experts" in the areas they are supposed to expert in.]
• Photos: John Legend Parties with Fever [Party photos -- not usually part of my analysis.]
• Lil' Kim Shows Her O-Face for Three-O Vodka's Latest Flavor [I don't drink. I don't write about music or liquor. And I don't appreciate lewd pitches.]

There are lots more like this. In September, in response to my request after one of these emails, a PR person there emailed me to promise to have me "permanently removed from all media outreach moving forward." Net effect: no effect at all. On January 24, in a telephone conversation, a PR person at 5WPR said he would "have IT remove you from the list" (apparently if you really want to get off, you need to talk to the IT department). A few days later, Ronn Torossian, the CEO, accepted my proposal to do an on the record interview, then apparently thought better of it and declined. And then, on February 1, I received another PR email from them "Expert Source: Future of Digital Journalism - New Education Course Preps Students."

5WPR, please begone.

To Seagate and Glasspoint and Calysto and all the other PR professionals and agencies out there who seem to care: if you cannot respect an unsubscribe, you are not professional. Get on the right side of this. If you own a dog in New York City, you have to pick up after it. And if you email influencers, you need a professional system that can remove people.

To other PR professionals: talk about this. Shame your colleagues. Keep America Beautiful -- respect the inboxes of the influencers you are trying to connect with.

To the PR Society of America -- you need a code of conduct that reflects the difference between right and wrong, and you need to withhold certifcation from people who violate it. You need a grievance policy that goes through you, so we can report people like 5WPR who don't appear to care. If you want to serve your industry, then create a certification for people who behave properly. Because right now, every failure to respect an unsubscribe tarnishes your industry.

Note: There's now a response from the PRSA here.

Half the pitches I receive are irrelevant

by Josh Bernoff

This is the second of three posts analyzing the contents of my inbox. Yesterday I looked at all my email. Today I take up the 51 emails I received from PR people over a week in January. Do the math: that's ten a day.

My topics range has increased since two years ago, when I was exclusively covering social technology -- now I cover social, mobile, internal collaboration and innovation, a range of topics. Even so, 45% of the pitches I received are either completely irrelevant to the areas I cover, or are related to topics I gave up over five years ago. (That's actually an improvement from two years ago.) How did headlines like these end up in my mailbox? Somebody paid to get my name off a list to send these -- what a waste of your money and my time.

• Elan Digital releases new upgraded version of the SDLBT5 SD/SDIO Loopback Test Tool
• Care Ambulance Acquired by Falck [what list did that come from?]
• GlassPoint January e-newsletter [for a solar energy company]
• Huntington Beach "Goes Green" with Steps Towards a Sustainable Huntington Beach [Am I on some green list somewhere?]
• Viva La Rock Partners with Atlantic Records and Warner Bros. Records for 2011

That last one, which is about an agency that promotes music, the PR person sent me twice -- the second one with a cute "wanted to make sure you received this." Just a hint, folks -- if I wasn't interested the first time, go away. And in general, "we have a customer" is not something that requires a press release.

I've also been monitoring whether PR emailers include an unsubscribe instruction. Of the PR emails I received, only 43% included a link or instruction to allow me to get off the mailing list. Some of those emails were personal -- they were an offer of a book, or a response to an earlier email, or from someone I knew or who connected with me specifically. But 18 out of 51 emails, more than a third of the pitches, had no easy way to get off the mailing list. (And folks, even if you include the word "Josh" in the pitch, I know you're sending the same thing to a bunch of folks, and you have to give me a way to get off your merry-go-round.)

Nokia, which always keeps us analysts richly supplied with email connections, send three messages during the week I tracked. One had an unsubscribe instruction, two didn't. How did that happen?

Just in case you think I only complain, I love marketing people who do their homework. So let's cite one who does his job right: John Zell, VP of Global CRM Solutions at Razorfish. Here's what he sent me.

Subject: A thought

I really  enjoyed reading your new book – book Empowered: Unleash your Employees, Energize your Customers, Transform your Business.

 Given your research and learning’s around the evolution of energizing and empowering customers within the social media space, I thought you might be interested in some research we just published.

The six month study, which we are calling Liminal,  is focused on customer engagement in this time of great transition. 

We chose the name Liminal for this report because it describes a state of being in flux—on the threshold of something new.

To us, the word Liminal does a superb job of describing the continuing evolution of how consumers choose to engage with a brand.

We took a ground up, customer centric  approach to understand things like -- how do marketers make sense not only of divergent touchpoints, but the disparate reasons why customers gravitate to them.

You can find the full report, is on this site: http://Liminal.Razorfish.com  (you will find a link to download the PDF).

If you have some time in the future and an interest, I would be happy to discuss the details with you.

Best regards, John.

While I'm not crazy about the subject line, John clearly know who I am, what I do, and what I am interested in. And being a nice guy, he send me a link instead of the whole PDF. Of all the pitches I received, this was one of the few I marked for a response.

Coming up: the PR emailers hall of shame.

 

Analysis of my inbox: 2 out 3 emails I get are from a machine

by Josh Bernoff

Is your inbox a communications channel? Or is it a target?

To find out, I analyzed a week's worth of the contents of my Forrester.com inbox. (I did this two years ago,too.)

Why do this? Because I think even as we embrace social, email is still the bread and butter of many of our interactions -- and it's a channel that's being clogged by out of control machines, and I don't mean spam.

In one week (26 Jan to 1 Feb 2011) I received 391 emails. I include spam caught by Outlook (most of the spam is screened by Postini before it even reaches my account). As an analyst, author, and employee of a company with over 1000 employees, my email box is not "typical" of anything. But here's the most interesting thing I found:

63% of my inbox came from either mass emailings or other computer-generated, automatic emails.

Only one in three of my emails is sent specifically to me by a person. I fear this trend is going to increase. Machines are very good and efficient at sending emails. I, however, not being a machine, have to read and respond to them individually. The machines are only going to get better at reaching me, but I'm spending a whole lot more of my time on emails to me from people.

It would be relatively easy to write code to put all the machine and mass emails into another box where I could sort through them quickly once a day. Who has this product?

The chart here shows a top-level analysis of what I receive. 38% of my inbox is individually addressed interactions with people inside or outside the company -- the real business that all of us depend on email for. 3% is personal email that's automatically generated (from our corporate travel system or from iTunes, for example). 15% is "BACN" -- the automatic emails from social networks. There's another 14% taken up by messages from Forrester and newsletters I actually signed up for. The rest -- about 28% -- is stuff I didn't ask for, PR pitches, email marketing, system messages ("Your mailbox is nearly full"), and spam.

 
I did the same analysis by size. I got 21 MB of stuff emailed to in a week. Forrester corporate emails took up 2.6 MB, partly because people inside Forrester are frequently emailing around large files instead of what we should be doing, which is posting the content on our Intranet and linking to it. And PR people sent me 6.8 MB worth of pitches, almost a third of my inbox. This is the equivalent of junk mail, because it's unsolicited newsletters, file attachments, and other stuff that's emailed since they think I'm more likely to open it than if they sent a link. The two largest individual emails I received were an unsolicited pitch from Minavox with a 3MB PDF attached, and a 1MB "call for papers" inviting me to contribute to a Swiss publication. If you're reading this, please don't send me megabytes of stuff at random. It annoys me.

Here are some more facts that you might find interesting.

• Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the busiest days in my inbox. I got the most pitches on Tuesday, and the least on Monday.
• 28% of my inbox is "Re:" something. I read these quickest. However, if you put "Re:" on a pitch you are a lying loser, so don't try it.
• 62% of my email comes from outside Forrester, 38% from inside. The inside email is slowly increasing as Forrester gets larger.
• Much of my internal mail concerns speeches, and there is also other personal business of course. But 16% of my personal emails are mass corporate emailings, and another 14% are corporate system messages. As Forrester gets larger, these mass emailings and automatic messages are making my internal emails mimic some of the onslaught I receive from outside the company.

In case you are wondering, during the same time period I sent 170 emails (I'm quite prolific, that's more than 20 per day). 58% were "Re:" another message, and 23% were acceptances, rejections, cancellations, or proposals for appointments. I sent 3 MB total, including only one file over 200KB (a file of corrections sent to my publisher.) 34% were sent outside of Forrester. Only 10 emails were sent to more than one person, and none (zero) were sent to a mailing list.

I'll follow this up with a more detailed analysis of the pitches in the next post, and my PR hall of shame in a third post.

How much of your email comes from a machine? What are you doing about it? Let fly!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Universal "Begone": a program for marketers on Valentine's Day

Email has gone too far. Our inboxes are full of unsolicited crap. And I don't mean spam. I just mean legitimate companies of all kinds emailing us about everything.

If you are a marketer, we have this Valentine's Day message for you: if you love your customer, let them go.

Marketers say that they want to be responsible, and many include links and instructions in their emails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act. These links are often small and grey -- hiding at the bottom of the message. The marketer is saying, in effect "We'll let you leave, we are complying with the law, but we don't want to make it easy."

It's like a scavenger hunt. Can you find the link? If you click on it, where do you end up? And what if you're not connected, say, on an airplane? Are you supposed to wait until you deplane to get off the mailing list? Why make it difficult?

ENOUGH.

Starting today, I propose a new program: Universal Begone.

Universal Begone is intended to make things easy for us, the consumers. The principle is simple.

If I receive an email from anyone whom I don't wish to receive emails with in the future, I reply with the word "begone" in the subject line.

Begone, as in "be gone, don't bother me anymore". A word, I point out, that is unlikely to be used for any other purpose.

The emailer is then responsible for taking me off their mailing list and not emailing me again.

If you’re sending a begone email response and want to spread the word and help the emailer you’ve “begoned” to understand, include the following URL in your email response: http://forr.com/Begone, the homepage for the Begone Movement.

Email marketers may reply "But . . . we might have you on multiple lists. Do you want to stop receiving our daily newsletter, or stop receiving emails about your order status?" Fine. Send an email back giving us a choice. "To get off all our mailing lists, reply with BEGONE LISTS. To get off our newsletter list, type BEGONE NEWSLETTER."

You may say “we’re not set up to receive responses from the email address we use for sending." Why is this the consumer’s problem? All you have to do is check the responses to see if they include the word “begone.” Easy.

Look, Zappos, the most popular shoestore on the planet, offers free returns. Does this mean they want you to return their products? Of course not. But by offering free returns, they say "We value our relationship with you" over "We want to make it harder for you to do returns." Isn't this how you want to treat your customers?

I look forward to hearing from all the technology vendors, email marketers, and government agencies who join the Begone Movement. I'll write about you. You can do this -- show me how. And I'll look forward to seeing your pledges at the home page for the Begone Movement.

 

How to get someone you don't know to help you. Hint: send a personal email.

I ask many people I don't know to help me -- to share numbers, interviews, etc. Often they say yes. I am grateful.

Many people who don't know me ask me for help. Often I say yes. But many of those requests are presented so poorly they make me cringe.

Basically, if you want my help, take a few moments to know who I am. If you send me what is clearly a mass email asking for help, forget it. There is a right and wrong way to do this.

This post is about the right way.

First off, use email. Yup. The old standby. I read my own emails; 95% of the people you want to reach do, too. It's fine to use LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter, but generally those are just a prelude to email anyway. I respond much more slowly to queries on LinkedIn and Facebook -- does the person you are seeking help from act that way, too?

If you don't have the email address, you can often track it down off a blog or on a site like ZoomInfo.Or, if you can reach someone through a social network, ask them for their email address there.("Hey, I have a proposal for you. Can I get your email and email it to you?"). Generally people will say yes.

Forget the phone, too interruptive, hit or miss, if you get the person in a bad mood you're dead. And sending unsolicited stuff through the mail is a really bad move and marks you as way behind the times. (Yes, people still do this -- I get letters all the time.)

The email should include the following elements, in roughly this order.

Subject line: A short description of what you want. Yup. Get to it. Don't hide it.

"Would like to interview you this week regarding your Twitter strategy for my new book"

"Want your input on my career change."

"Are you available to speak at our Web Developer conference on January 21?"

Greeting. Short. Start the body of the email with this. If you have a connection, use it.

"Hi, Josh"

"I saw you speak at the Web 2.0 Conference."

"We spoke briefly in Atlanta at Home Depot"

Who you are. Also short. The recipient doesn't want your whole life story. You can include a link for more info:

"I'm an MBA student at Harvard"

"I'm CMO of a small Web services company"

"I am a recruiter at the American Red Cross."

"I am the coauthor of the bestselling book Groundswell. If you want to know more, see my blog here: http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell"

An indication you are familiar with the recipient's work. This shows respect, it also shows that you put a little effort in. This makes all the different. Don't be a sycophant, but you can certainly be respectful. DO NOT OMIT THIS -- since it really shows you are not a mass emailer.

"I have been really impressed with your online community for credit scores -- it's amazing you can get people to connect around this."

"I read your book and I found the section on customer service to be extremely helpful."

"I was amazed that a company like Coca-cola was able to reach out to its fans through a Facebook page -- I saw you were in charge of that effort in Advertising Age."

What you want. Brief, and to the point. Be respectful but neither pushy nor presumptive nor reticent. Ask in a straightforward way. (I get emails all the time that omit this. And I think "why are you bothering me?" No, I don't want to just be friends -- just tell me what you want.)

"I would like to interview you this week about your activities; it will take about half an hour."

"Can you tell me quickly whether you think a marketing person should bet their career or social media?"

"Can you share any statistics on traffic for Facebook pages?"

Statements of mutual benefit. Why should we work together?

"Many of the companies we profile come off looking great -- I think our readers would love to hear your story."

"We will include your company name in our article and attribute credit properly."

"I think based on my background that I'd be a great fit. You seem to need more people with industry experience."

Details. Keep it short, include what's necessary. If you have to include more information don't send a long email, don't paste in graphics, and for lord's sake don't include an unsolicited 3MB attachment that clogs up people's connections and email stores. A deadline is a good thing to include.

"Our conference attracts over 500 senior people and has included speakers like Barry Diller in the past."

"I will provide opportunities to review all the quotes for accuracy before we publish."

"I don't think this will take more than 15 minutes."

"I really need to complete this before the end of the week; I'm sorry about the rush, but the editors insist on this timing."

Friendly close and repeat important elements. By this point you can add a little flattery, just a little.

"I really hope you can help me -- you are clearly a marketing leader whose activity deserves to be highlighted."

"Thanks for your help with this conference. I hope to see you the next time I am in Boston."

Signature that's not some baroque object. Check your auto signature. Is that really what you want to be communicating to someone you want to ask for help? And how long is it? Are you really that important? Contact info is usually sufficient.

OK, let's put's it all together. Keeping it as short as possible is important, but with all these parts you get a moderate length email. Here's one I might send:

Would like to interview you this week for my new book, Groundswell Heroes

Sally:

My friend Fred at Vendor Solutions has said you are one of his best clients. I was particularly interested to hear how you measure the value of community activity for your business -- that seems amazing for someone who sells greeting cards.

If you don't know me, I'm the coauthor of Groundswell, a bestselling book about social technologies. You can read more about it here.

We usually tell people to evaluate ROI for communities partly through sales. But based on your comments in Advertising Age, it appears you've got a unique way to measure ROI.

I'd like to include the story of what you did in Groundswell Heroes, the new book we are publishing this year with Harvard Business Press. I'd like do an interview with you by Wednesday of next week. It should take about half an hour.

The folks we interviewed for Groundswell were generally pleased to be featured as examples of best practices in their industries.

Once this is written up, we'll send it to you so you can check that the facts are correct and that we have quoted you accurately.

I hope to hear from you in the next few days -- I'd really like to include you. I think People-based Greetings is just the kind of company our readers will be able to relate to. (And I just sent one of your cards to my mom -- she loved it!)

Thanks again.

Josh Bernoff | Senior VP, Idea Development

Forrester Research (www.forrester.com)

Co-author of Groundswell

617-613-5789

Blog: www.bernoff.com

Twitter: @jbernoff

Final Note: What do you do if you can't get through because the person is inaccessible? Go to the Web site and check the media relations and PR contacts --email them. And treat them with the same respect as you would the actual target. They are people too, they will respond to the human treatment. If it's not a media request, you may have to go through some other intermediary, but again, treat the intermediary with the same respect as you would the person you are reaching.

Three PR Emailers That Didn't Seem Very Human

by Josh Bernoff

I said I would call out PR emailers who didn't treat me right. That starts today.

All three of these PR emailers are guilty of the same sin: failing to give me a way to opt out. It's human to give me a way to say good bye. Otherwise I feel helpless and I resent the companies who won't let me go. That's bad PR.

But behind each of these emails is a person, not a spammer. I spoke to each one, and their stories are instructive. I wanted to get to the human side of PR emails. Interestingly, when I said "I'd like to speak to you about how you do marketing," they all assumed I wanted to highlight what they'd done well.

Marketers, as you read these stories, ask yourself, "Is this how I behave?" Then start marketing more like a human.

Matrixstream's Aaron Keogh has his hands full

Matrixstream is an IPTV platform for streaming high-definition video. Aaron Keogh, their director of business development, has been emailing me for years, because I used to be a TV analyst. I've never written about the company, and I haven't covered TV in the last two years. Here's a typical email:

That's 396KB of unsolicited PR. I have received 20 emails like this in the last two years, often with big attachments, and sometimes multiple times. I've asked to be removed from Keogh's list at least three times.

When I called Keogh, he told me he developed his email list himself over seven years and he maintains it himself. When he realized I was going to write about his email hygiene and not his streaming product, he claimed I was behaving unfairly and threatened to call the CEO of Forrester Research.

While Matrixstream's press emails don't include an unsubscribe link or instruction, Keogh says anyone can email and he'll remove them. "It's important to be responsive to people," he told me. "Generally I'll catch it after a couple of times or sometimes if they call me."

Aaron is not evil, he's just trying to represent his company, but I think he's too busy to pay proper attention to the annoyance he may be causing. I am hoping this is his wake up call, and a similar one for others who aren't up to the task of properly maintaining their own email lists.

Chris Rollyson didn't realize that he's an email marketer

Chris Rollyson is a social media expert, sort of like me. He helps companies tap into the power of Linked In. He reaches out to people by running seminars. His email is very clever, since it taps into your own desire to introduce others to the power of social media. It begins like this:

Your advice: Whom should I invite to these LinkedIn seminars?
From: Chris Rollyson
To: Bernoff, Josh

Hello Josh,

There has never been a better time to use LinkedIn to develop fruitful relationships.  People can help people meet their goals, and knowing how manage more connections will be a huge advantage.  LinkedIn is built for this.

Participants of the Executive's Guide to LinkedIn seminars learn network strategies and dozens of features that 95% of LinkedIn members don't know. Not only that, they continue learning in the private EGLI online community afterwards.  We have new seminars in 3 cities: Chicago 19 Jan.  |  Cleveland 28 Jan.  |   Wheaton, IL 6 Feb.

I am looking for people who want to build strong networks that help them do remarkable things.  Who can you recommend who may be in situations like these?

This struck me as trying a little too hard and sure enough, while there were plenty of links to join the seminar, there wasn't one for getting off the mailing list.

When I called Rollyson he was very pleased to hear from me. It was very hard to get him to understand that I was not happy about his email practices. "I don't really see this as email marketing," he said. "Every one of the people I'm sending to, I know personally." Rollyson has a mailing list of 3000 people, all through personal contacts. He got my card at a Forrester event.

Let's be clear. If you email 3000 people, even if they are your "friends," you are doing email marketing, and you need to do it properly.

To his credit, I think Rollyson has learned that he made a mistake, agrees that I have a good point, and is likely to change his practices.

Marketwire has a bug in its system

Marketwire is a wire service that distributes email on behalf of companies. You might think that if people like Keogh and Rollyson used Marketwire, they wouldn't have problems. But Marketwire makes mistakes, too. They regularly email me on behalf of International Datacasting Corp, a company in which I have no interest. It's a very professional looking release.

But there is no unsubscribe link. I didn't reply because who would think you could reply to "Marketwire.Release@ marketwire.com"? So how do I get off this train?

I called Marketwire's head of PR, Lisa Davis. She immediately said the lack of an unsubscribe was a mistake, since every Marketwire release is supposed to have one.

The next day, Davis called back to say that there was a glitch in their system, because this client was Canadian and had worked with the portion of Marketwire that had originally been Canadian (and therefore not subject to the US's CAN-SPAM act). But it was still supposed to have an easy unsubscribe and they've now fixed that.

They also called me back to ask which lists I wanted to be removed from, "Internet" or "Software." That's about as targeted as dividing the world into old people and young people. And that's part of the problem.

Lessons from three emailers

None of these emails was going to make a significant impression on me anyway. Rollyson's was a bit intriguing, but the others are way out of my space. But once you get on an emailer's list, it's hard to get off. It's spray and pray, as they say.

All three annoyed me by treating me as a target, not a human. Influencers and journalists are human, too. We get mad at this stuff. You want us to like your products, so why do you behave like this?

If you're big enough to email, either get a system that works or hire a PR firm or a wire that can do it right. Or better yet, stop with the press releases already. They include such trivial content, we've all learned to delete them pretty quickly.

PR folks -- anyone -- can you please explain to me, your "target," how this is supposed to work? I'll listen, I promise.

A day in the life of my inbox -- and when email marketing is spam

by Josh Bernoff

As I contemplate what it means to be a human in all modes of communication -- including email -- I realized that I need some context. Is my mailbox really as full of offensive messages as it seems? How many?

So yesterday, 1/13/2009, I undertook an analysis of everything that landed in my inbox that day. It's revealing in itself.

Let's be clear hear. My inbox is probably very different from yours, unless you're a journalist, analyst, or popular blogger. People like me get a lot more pitches, press releases, and the like. That's the part of this I find most interesting -- looking at what comes into that inbox from marketers and making that conversation more human.

What is spam and what is marketing?

You've seen plenty of definitions for spam and email marketing. But this is personal with me, so I'm making up my own.

spam is email sent to masses of people and no targeting, with an expectation that very few will respond, and no consideration for whether people will be offended

email marketing is email that is sent to a carefully chosen group of people with the expectation of forming or extending a relationship

This is not black and white, it is a continuum, based on how much you care. If you do your "email marketing" and care only a little about relationships, you are close to a spammer.

Notice that my email marketing definition also includes not only "traditional" email marketing but press releases and PR emails, since they are sent to groups and hope to form relationships. This is a specialized and frequently abused form of email marketing.

Basic statistics

Yesterday was pretty light, no special events like CES or MacWorld. Here is what I received on January 13:

• 107 emails to Forrester Outlook inbox (includes 1 spam)
• 23 emails to my gmail address (includes 16 spam caught by gmail). I use this address for personal emails and when I'm acting as a consumer and not a business person.
• 75 emails caught by Forrester's spam blocker Postini, of which 71 were actual spam and 4 were not.

Totals: 205 emails, 88 spam, 117 non spam. The base for the rest of this post is the 117.

What's in my inbox?

In rough order from largest to smallest bunches:

• 27 (23%) were personal emails, to me or a few people including me. 21 were from coworkers and 6 were from outside. Only one of the outside emails was unsolicited -- it was from a guy named Lars Leafblad in Minneapolis who wrote a bunch of notes about Groundswell and mailed it to 80 of his friends. I found that pretty interesting.
• 22 (19%) were traditional email marketing. Three of these were directly relevant to me as a customer with information about my account -- for example, with airline miles updates and a note from E*Trade. The other 19 were solicitations and "updates" from companies that have my name. 7 were for events. None of the 19 interested me.
• 18 (15%) were PR pitches or press releases. Of these:
  • 10 were press releases
  • 2 were releases with a note at the top from the PR person
  • 3 were notes from PR with no release
  • 1 was a newsletter
  • 1 was about an earnings call (more on that later).
• Interestingly, 10 of the 18 had no unsubscribe link. What's the protocol here? PR people assume that we'll just respond and say "take me off the list" but 6 of the 10 with no unsubscribe link were press releases that didn't look like that would work. Only 4 of the press releases and pitches included a note to "give me a call if you are interested." What were they about? Hard to remember (there's a cautionary note). They include:
  • 2 copies each of Dish Network's 2 releases (why two copies?)
  • Tivo response to Dish in their patent lawsuit -- that was at least moderately amusing. Of course I haven't covered DVRs since 2006.
  • Carlos Carvajal of Vignette's heartfelt note about why they're cancelling their user conference was nice and personal, but I don't really cover Vignette.
  • Blake Cahill's beautifully formatted newsletter about Visible Technologies which was quickly passed over, along with the traditional releases, since there's rarely useful information in newsletter and press release formats -- they get maybe 5 seconds of my attention.
  • BL Ochman's note about being tapped as an expert on the presidential choice of dog, which was funny, I had no idea she had this knowledge.
  • "Newport Coast Investments Acquires Assets & Intellectual Property of Product Placement Firm NextMedium." How did I get on this list? It's symbolic of the whole bunch, which taken together had about two and half minutes of relevance to me. What a waste.
• 9 (8%) were a result of a mistake at Google. Google's investor relations announcement email was misconfigured so that every reply was forwarded to the whole list. In other words, you didn't need to make the "reply all" mistake, they did it for you! So I, along with hundreds of others, got emails that said "please take me off this list" and "why am I getting these random emails." Still more email pollution and wasted time, but at least this one was funny to watch. Just their bad luck to have this happen on the day I was tracking email. (I've seen this happen 3 times in 13 years of being an analyst. It's always a blast to observe.)
• 9 (8%) were calendar invitations or cancellations.
• 8 (7%) were CCs on other people's internal conversations. About half of these were relevant to me.
• 8 (7%) were internal mass emails from people at Forrester. Most of these were borderline irrelevant, but I understand the need for them. You need to know that somebody is going to replace your office chair, and why the bad smell is coming down from the 8th floor. These email lists gets abused occasionally, but not very much, which is good since we have 1000 people now.
• 6 (5%) were BACN from other sites. I should turn most of this off, but I'm too lazy.
• 6 (5%) were news digests. Two are SmartBriefs. I find these useful.
• 4 (4%) were automated messages. One was an out of office and 3 were from Outlook about how full my mailbox is.

In case you are wondering I sent 35 emails out myself. 24 were personal to one or a small group of people and 11 were responses to meeting invitations.

Lessons from this exercise

I'm not out to get you. I'm not going to do what Chris Anderson did. But I did learn a few things:

Less than half my email is of any interest to me, even after the spam blockers block the obvious spam. And unlike John Wanamaker, I know which half. For the people in the other half (both inside my company and outside) why are you wasting my time?

Nearly all of the pitches and releases sent my way fail. I bet that is true for most journalists as well. PR pros, tell me this: why isn't it better to spend your money reaching out intimately to a dozen people instead of sending mail to 1000? Aren't most of these press releases and notes a waste of my time and yours?

Not including unsubscribe on any mass email is a big mistake. It's not just the law, it's stupid, because it annoys people who you are trying to impress. Will I hold it against you? Yes I will. Stay tuned.

I'd welcome comments from the PR community about what you're doing to improve things.