In the wake of a heavily-commented blog post I wrote five months ago that attributed David Mullen to the notion that PR is best defined as people relations and not public relations, I question why so-called A-List bloggers and marketing professionals who were targeted by Beth Brody’s PR firm today aren’t calling this principle into question.
I didn’t receive Beth’s email, so I can only share the thoughts of Chris Abraham, Ken Wheaton, Jennifer Leggio, Jacob Morgan, Cydney Wuerffel, and Nick O’Neill. Click their names to read their posts.
Apparently, Brody PR bulk emailed a message to dozens (hundreds?) of bloggers and professionals today asking them to read and review an e-book. Any other day, this would be a routine email one would read, reply, or delete. But this morning’s message included the names and email addresses of every recipient in the ‘cc’ field, enabling everyone to see everyone else on the distribution list.
Big fail.
It got worse when people clicked their email program’s ‘reply to all’ button and everyone who got spammed with each other’s contact information were consequently sent further bounces.
Nick summarizes:
If you are looking for a PR firm, I’d suggest avoiding Brody PR until they go through a significant rebranding and this issue is all but forgotten.
Brody should also register to attend the Advanced Learning Institute’s social media for crisis communications conference in November.
But wait. Excepting Jacob and Cydney, everyone else received a blog comment from an anonymous user called “rbbb” or “rbbb1″ with the following text:
I created a list of social media experts who might be interested in reviewing a new guide to social media for small biz. I inadvertently put the list name in the cc: box, rather than the bcc: box. A few folks must have hit the “reply all” button, rather than clicking on the “unsubscribe link” at the bottom, which started a stream of spam. Please accept my personal apology, albeit a little late in the day, since I was trying to remove everyone who wanted to be unsubscribed from the list immediately.
Blame Brody PR all you want for what it should have done this morning–but the very fact someone is commenting with the same text on every blog is indicative the PR firm doesn’t view bloggers as people.
One can argue a generic comment is better than no comment–but in this case, there is zero value when Brody PR is using the same comment to Chris, Ken, Jennifer, and Nick. Brody did not write a “personal apology” or it would have been personal, aka different for each recipient. I hope other companies heed the lesson well.
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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I don’t get why Brody is telling people that she is spending time removing names from this list. She shouldn’t be using this list for anything (for a while…a long while). Other than that, she made an unintentional mistake. This is not Dan Rather. If she does go down for this, I hope bloggers and new media pull their own plugs when they goof. This is way overboard. And this wasn’t spam, it was a simple press release. How come no one faults the recipients for hitting the reply all button? If auto-responders are doing this, shame on the tech who set up the mail server to auto-respond to the sender + CC list. But Brody is low-hanging fruit, so the mob trashes her and her clients. Welcome to new media.
Hi Ari,
Some good points here, but I’m confused. I’ve read (here and on a few other blogs) that Beth Brody put the names of everyone on the distribution list in the “cc” field of the email. I received that email and that wasn’t the case.
In fact, the distribution list was in the “To:” field of the email, but it was a bulk distribution list, not individual names. This meant when people (like the first person who responded) replied to “all”, everyone was copied on the email. Subsequent people who replied to the first “all” response then kept blasting the list.
It was stupid, yes, but the over-reaction of the PR community was even worse (in my opinion).
Of course, I blogged about it, too. After all, how many times a year can someone use the made-up word “Spamalanche” to describe what happened.
Have a great day and keep up the great blog.
Thanks,
Mike Bawden
Brand Central Station
New from Mike Bawden: PR pile-on
Say what, Mike? You wrote about that contact list in the CC field too! In any case, whether the addresses were in “to” or “cc,” hitting reply all would reply to all in either.
I hadn’t realized individual names were not there. Thanks for the clarification.
Everyone makes mistakes, and if you say you haven’t, then you’re lying. The difference is, nowadays an error in judgement goes “viral” and can ruin a career by the press of the Submit button. There is a vast difference between those who make an innocent faux pas and those who are just plain lazy. I think we all need to lighten up a bit.
OK, so the bigger mess is Brody put all the addresses in the TO: field. This explains the reply all issue. The CC explanation didn’t make sense. People hit plain old reply and didn’t notice the whole list was being hit? In the newspaper biz, this is what you call news that got play cuz it was a slow news day. Still, this is not the crime of the century. It’s a stupid mistake. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t done something like this, including me. But does this merit efforts to harrass her clients into terminating business? Fine with me as along as every blogger or reporter who gets a fact wrong that causes a business to lose customers or profit resigns on demand.
Ari,
You make good points. I struggle with the same part you did – copy and pasting the same apology into a bunch of blogs was the wrong tactic unfortunately. Had she reviewed some of the posts being written about the situation she may have recognized that.
Rachel
New from Rachel Kay: Crisis Communication for the PR Agency
She’s since commented on your blog post (linked in your comment footer) so maybe she is recognizing things.
I agree, was the wrong approach but at least it was an approach over nothing. Not everything has to be 100% new, it can’t be. Maybe personalize 2 sentences to your author then the rest will most likely be the same. That’s what they should have done.
Dear Ari,
Many wise people shared their knowledge with me this week. I have summarized their valuable information here, http://brodypr.blogspot.com/ so that others can learn from my mistake.
Good luck with your run for City Council.
Beth Brody
This is an extremely interesting topic and something that has caused some backlash it appears. I think, however, that PR is about informing the people and relaying the message that client wants put out there.