Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker, has created a prspammers wiki where she and others can publicly out PR firms that are spamming bloggers at their personal email addresses, or using other unsavory spammish practices. She announced the blacklist in a twitter message, here, inviting others to add to it.
Various practitioners (Todd Defren, Brian Solis, and so on) have written what I think are heartfelt apologies for the missteps that their firms and the industry as a whole has made. These are being collated at PR Openmic.
Personally, I feel that it is the whole system that is wrong, and piecemeal solutions like blacklists and filtering, and one:one agreements about how I, some specific blogger, should be approached by some specific firm won't work in the long run -- these are all stop gaps and band-aids.
The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk.
We, the bloggers and journalists, need to stand up and shout, 'Stop! This doesn't work! Shut up! Stop shouting! Stop screaming your bilge! Stop screaming and listen!' We need to shout them down, because they aren't taking our subtle little hints, like deleting the email and not responding. They aren't paying attention. There is no feedback loop, just a messianic faith in the power of PR blitz.
Despite the fact that some PR practitioners publicly state their allegiance to the Cluetrain Manifesto, real conversation is too time consuming for companies: their attention span is too short. Maybe someday, a decade from now, PR flacks will have evolved the new DNA needed to really change. An occasional mutant may pop up even today, but the corporate/pr firm hypocrisy is so general and contaminating to all it touches that even the most enlightened will find themselves turned, just like a well-meaning businessman will find him/herself involved in bribes after a few months in Russia or Pakistan: there is no option.
So, this is an additional argument for MicroPR: forcing PR firms to approach us in the open, on open social flow apps like Twitter, and in the small, where they have to jettison all the claptrap of the old press release model. In the open, that can't lie easily, or they will be caught on it. In the small, they have to junk the meaningless superlatives, the bogus quotes that no CEO ever mouthed, the run-on phrases, the disembodied third party mumbo jumbo, as if the press release were edited by God.
On Twitter, I will simply block people that abuse my willingness to have an open dialog about products with PR folks, or basically anyone else, for that matter. And I am implicitly inviting everyone in my Twitter sphere of influence to participate, too. I want it to be a shared space for investigation into new tools, so by all means, twitpitch me!
But please, please, get out of my inbox. I am using that for completely different things: communicating with people I know relatively well, about mutual concerns. PR folks pushing what they thinks is newsworthy information to me via email is so close to spam that there is no practical difference. So unless I have explicitly signed up to receive it on my email, don't send it. Twitpitch me, instead (the specific of how to do that are here: Twitpitch Is The Future).
Email I have asked to receive is considered 'Bacn' not 'Spam', to use Chris Brogan's term. Brian Solis attempts to make the case that PR folks sending things we might want -- based on their decisions -- should be considered 'Tofu' not 'Spam'. I am sorry Brian, but there is no Tofu, there is only Spam. Just because I personally know a PR person, and have chatted in the past, doesn't give them the right to send me some email about AdjectiveNoun's brand new Transfibrilator 2.0. It's like your a taxi driver proselytizing for a religious sect, or your GP trying to sell you tupperware. The personal social or business relationship is not an open invitation to selling other junk.
I also suggest to bloggers and journalists to do as I have done, and post a persistent link on your blog called 'How To Pitch Me' or the like, and state how others ought to -- and ought not to -- pitch you. I explicitly say 'don't use email, use twitter', but you should each state explicitly how they should do it. I also state that I have a three strikes and you're out rule, after which they are spam filtered.
I predict that we will see a huge shift toward open and small, toward MicroPR, and that the smartest PR professionals will adopt that with relief. They know the Emperor has not clothes, that this scattershot approach to getting the word out is dead. We have to point them in the right direction, and hope they will pick up on the new mode of interaction, but if they don't some other group will figure it out, and those marketing dollars will shift, like a river jumping it's banks.
[Update 6:23pm:
jtoeman directed my attention to this post, Hey Bloggers, Tell Us How To Pitch You, where he asks us to tell them what to do.
Meg Roberts makes some very naive statements in her post, A Young Pro’s Take: Media Relations and the New PR Blacklists, but asks several compelling questions: why don't colleges teach more about pitching the media, and -- even more compelllingly -- what are the training programs in place at the PR firms, if any. I bet it's all slapdash, with new hires expected to learn by watching or doing, with a sort of sink-or-swim philosophy behind it.]
