CorpComms Magazine

Firing off unsolicited and utterly irrelevant emailed press releases by the inbox-load might not appear that major a crime, compared to all the other issues in this world, but that is not how it is seen by some journalists.

Take the spleen that Charles Arthur, technology editor of The Guardian, has vented on his blog. 'The proliferation of badly-curated mailing lists is making the email problem worse and some of those put in charge of those lists clearly underestimate how annoying the effects can be,' he opined last year in a 1,200-word tirade entitled Help! My email isn't full of stuff I want to read.One year later, Arthur's anger had become incandescent. He asked at least one public relations person to stop sending him 'irrelevant rubbish,' complained of 'practitioners who pimp ever-expanding lists of email addresses' and announced that he would be deleting all emails that arrived from one particular media distribution company without bothering to read them.

Arthur isn't alone in being driven wild by the pings of unwanted email. Kevin Braddock, a freelance who writes for British magazine GQ, once posted on his blog a long list of pubic relations people who had sent him annoying emails.

In January, RealWire, a Lincoln-based media distribution agency that sends out between 50 and 100 emailed press releases a week, picked up the mantle by launching 'An Inconvenient PR Truth: a campaign to reduce the level of irrelevant press release emails which pollute the online media environment.'

The campaign published a 'bill of rights' to protect journalists from the email plague and is calling for a 'constructive discussion' between all the parties to find a solution.

Chief executive Adam Parker says the problem has worsened because of the proliferation of Internet, blogging and social media communities and the ability to reach them all by a simple click on a computer mouse.

Parker says: 'Email has enabled people to send a press release to 1,000 journalists as easily as to one, but it means there are increasing amounts of irrelevance in their inboxes.

'The emphasis has to be on quality, not quantity. Public relations and media distribution companies add value by understanding what is relevant to whom, not by just sending out 5,000 random emailed press releases.'

RealWire's ten journalist 'rights' seem common sense enough, stating that PR people should not rely wholly on purchased media lists, should always read the publication to which it is about to pitch press releases and should never call just to check that emails have arrived.

The campaign also calls for social media, technology public relations agency, education and measurement initiatives to improve the situation and has received industry support from public relations boss Mark Borkowski, founder of the eponymous PR agency, and media firms including Press Dispensary, Pocket-lint.com and TrustedReviews.

Angling lines

Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) president Jay O'Connor is taking the matter forward by offering to host a working session with PR practitioners, media, bloggers and RealWire's campaigners to develop guidelines to complement the organisation's code of conduct and training courses on dealing with and pitching to media.

She states: 'There is value in the conversation Adam and his team have started, and there's also something to be gained from looking at the factors behind poor targeting of media, including issues such as client expectations and systems of measurement.

'The guidelines should be something practitioners and the media craft together with the goal of encouraging best practice and we should get the input of those who do it well. There are many practitioners who engage exceptionally well with those they wish to influence.'

Daryl Willcox, chairman of Daryl Willcox Publishing, an online media intelligence firm, with 2,500 clients, believes the answer lies largely in a more personal approach, working with PR agencies to ensure that they do not just focus on broad media distribution but take a more qualitative view.

Technology can provide some answers. DWP's Response Source service, for example, allows journalists to flag up specific issues that they are writing about to thousands of PR people who may be able to offer relevant content.

'The PR industry does not need to do much to resolve the issue,' says Willcox. 'The problem is not going to go away automatically but part of the solution is for PR people to do their jobs properly and spend more time doing their lists.'

The volume end of the industry also acknowledges that there is an issue but believes that range of the services that it offers is not fully understood by critics.

Roy Jacques, UK sales director at Canadian-owned global news distribution business Marketwire, says it provides not only press release distribution but media contact management, multimedia, media monitoring and other workflow solutions for public relations, investor relations, journalists and other communications professionals.

Jacques says: 'We send out a lot of press releases but we are dealing with business customers and business and media outlets. It's a bit misleading to look at that number in isolation.

'It's a big industry now. There are more than 2,000 PR agencies in London alone. It's incumbent upon us as a provider to provide media lists that are as accurate as they can be so they can work out which media they want to target but there is no one-size-fits-all philosophy.

'Some journalists want to see everything, while others only want to receive communications via Twitter. It's all to do with personal preference.'

Similarly, at US media distribution group Business Wire, regional vice president of Europe, Dick Bromley says up to 1,000 press releases are despatched each day to as many as 4,000 online media sites, plus thousands of newspapers and magazines and the mobile services of newswire services Associated Press and AFP.

He says the group adds value for clients by distributing to Internet sites such as Google, Yahoo and specialist blogging communities but also by translating press releases into 60 different languages as part of its service.

Bromley says: 'These are things companies don't do themselves. We have a multi-faceted approach that adds real value for our clients.'

Hook, line and sinker

Many media distribution companies say the buck stops with the public relations professionals who use their lists and distribution capabilities to ensure that they do not allow the digital communication age to become an excuse for not having productive working relationships with journalists.

'Having a good relationship with the journalists in your sector always helps,' says Bromley. 'Giving them relevant information at the right time, in the right format and in the multimedia files that will make their life easier significantly increases your chances of your press release being covered.'

For their part, public relations professionals say that media distribution lists and capabilities have to be used with great care.

Paul Simpson, account manager at FirePR, a London-based consumer, lifestyle, corporate, technology and trade public relations agency, says: 'The difficulty is that many lists aren't kept up to date so that when you send out emails to people on a list you can get quite a lot back saying someone left the company in 2007.

'At FirePR we have a limit of 50 journalists in a list. We wouldn't mail more than that initially. But we normally find that talking to journalists and building contacts works much better. The best thing to do is to have high-priority targets, send out emails one by one and to contact people separately.'

Mark Houlding, managing director of PR agency Rostrum Communications, also believes that media distribution lists do have their place, though this is emphatically not for the mass mailing of content to journalists.

'The act of compiling a media distribution list is a timely reminder of the main publications, journalists and bloggers covering a sector or market, particularly a market one is not instantly familiar with,' he says.

'From there, it's possible to research and accurately target the most appropriate journalist or blogger on a one-to-one basis for a specific story.'

And the in-house view from Eric Edge, global chief communications officer of advertising agency Euro RSCG Worldwide, is that, while media distribution lists are often out of date and do not always connect with the right person or beat, they offer a good reminder of publications that you may not normally think of or work with.

'They're not totally a waste of money and time,' he adds, 'but they're also not totally useful. Pitches to and relationships with specific reporters are still the best way to go.'

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