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.

Not Really Spam

[Roody Blashes]

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".

Re:Screw ups

[Nuclear Elephant]

When will someone step up and be the hero in this story?

5. linvir got on /. and flamed everyone, showing what a big sexy stud he is

Re:*hangs head*

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'm sure your high-school, grammar, teacher is also, hanging her head...

Re:Screw ups

[merc]

Someone at Rocket Science somehow didn't know who they were meant to email, so they just sent it to all the addresses they could find....Mr. Egomaniac Editor then wrote a very sensationalised blog entry about the incident, incorrectly referring to it as 'spam'.

Spam (or UCE/UBE--Unsolicited Commercial/Bulk Email) is typically defined as email which is unsolicited in nature. From what you said it sounds as though RS harvested all of the addresses "they could find". It certainly doesn't sound as though they were writing to a list of those who subscribed to receive information from them. If that's true then it wasn't incorrect to refer to it as spam, in fact it matches the definition right on.

I've noticed that spammers always like to infer that spamming is something "the other guy does", never are they actually guilty of spam since they've managed to rationalize it one way or another. As far as my network and systems go (since they are my personal property), it's about consent.

Ever hear of Bigfoot.com?

[kopo]

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?