For PR pros, spam filters are a mixed blessing. An in-box free
of Viagra ads, body parts and letters from Nigerian
parliamentarians? Great. But there's a downside. Outgoing press
releases may be going into the same black hole, and their authors
may never know it.
"It's actually worse than just pitches. Some journalist
correspondence also disappears, if you aren't aware of how spam
catchers work," says Kirk Sullivan, PR director at air- filter
manufacturer IQAir North America. "I was working with one reviewer
down in New Zealand who wanted to cover our product and what we
were doing. When he wrote back to me, I hit reply, and his own spam
filter blocked it because his subject line had the word 'free,' as
in: 'Do you have some free time?' So he didn't get that e-mail."
Sullivan found out about the lapse after writing twice more and
then, finally, calling New Zealand.
Marketers are spending heavily to avoid such traps. In 2003
online marketers spent $230 million to avoid spam blockers, and
Jupiter Research predicts the number will swell to $419 million by
2008. But the PR community does not have to spend that much. In
fact, a more judicious use of e-mail could help PR executives to
avoid being filtered out at virtually no added cost. It's easy,
really: To avoid having your messages treated like bulk mail, just
don't spam.
"Think from the point of view of the person receiving the
e-mail," says Mike O'Brien, CEO of Can-SPAM Compliance Co., which
helps companies comply with anti-spam legislation. "Would I want to
get something that everyone else is getting, or would I rather
think that this person thought of me separately?"
This is just the kind of question spam filters ask. Filters are
looking for signs that a message is less-than-unique. This means
the blast of multiple copies is a warning sign, especially when the
"bcc" or blind copy field is used. (The bcc field offers the sender
a way to deliver multiple copies, with each recipient being unaware
that multiple copies have been sent.) Filters hate the "bcc" field,
and they also hate a vast range of words that show up too often in
too many messages, such as 'Free,' 'Save', or 'Discount.' They hate
the names of body parts and pharmaceuticals. All these triggers
tell a filter that a piece of mail is likely due for the circular
file.
Other times, however, it is impossible to tell why a message has
been flagged for destruction.
"Recently I pitched a release to a good 20 journalists, some of
whom I've had a good working relationship with in the past. When
two who I knew well didn't respond, I sent a second, short note as
a reminder. Both said they never received my original query," says
Bonnie Hilliard, principal of Pipeline MediaSource. "Was that due
to a spam filter or a server glitch or an itchy delete finger? I'll
never know...[so] now make a point of going back through my sent
mail and sending short reminders or additional information to
journalists who have not responded. That way I'm also able to
reintroduce the query."
For many PR practitioners, that kind of hands-on effort may be
the price of e-mail's convenience. Take Jeanne Norberg, director of
the Purdue [University] News Service, whose releases were filtered
out by the servers at Thomson Newspapers in Indiana. "I found out
because the city editor of one of the papers, the Logansport Pharos
Tribune, called and said he was concerned that he hadn't gotten our
news for a couple of weeks," she says. "We checked with their IT
administrator, and learned they were auto filtering information
received from list serves. So we asked the editor to talk to IT and
say he valued our information. The IT administrator then wrote a
script that allowed our material to get through."
Efforts to block spam can sometimes interfere with internal
communications. At COMSYS Information Technology Services Corporate
Communications Manager Natalie N. Ray sends out company-wide
announcements to some 4,000 employees and consultants, many of whom
have external mailboxes. To stop these messages from being blocked,
she has had to change her outgoing addresses from the generic
Employee Communications to the more specific COMSYS Employee
Communications. Likewise, "Marketing" now appears as "COMSYS
Marketing" on all outgoing messages.
Still, the system is not perfect. In one recent instance, a
message regarding "breast cancer" got through, but not without
first being altered by the company's own filters to read "expletive
cancer."
Fortunately, the effort to evade spam filters doesn't have to be
so labor intensive. Several steps can help to ensure the safe
passage of most e-mail messages. Bonus: Many of these are simply
good PR practices.
- Avoid hyperbole in both the subject line and the text e.g.
FANTASTIC! STUPENDOUS! - Edit out phrases that could be seen as business clichés.
"Information you requested," "Special offer" and so on. - Keep questionable language out of both the subject line and the
body. That's not just body parts and pharmaceuticals, but more
subtle verbiage such as free, guarantee, bargain, cash. - Put it in plain text. No all-caps, bold or italics. No
exclamation points. - Keep that bcc field clean. "If you are sending the same pitch
to a number of outlets, use a piece of software that does an
e-mail-merge, placing one address in the 'to' field and your
message in plain text," says Mark J. Grossman, principal of PR firm
Grossman Strategies. "I use Baseline Data System's Office
Accelerator, but there are others out there." - Don't use your primary address to send out volumes of e-mail.
Get a secondary address from Yahoo or some other service. A bulk
e-mail message can cause the sender's address to be blocked by some
recipients' servers, "and you don't want your legitimate e-mail
ever to be blocked," O'Brien says. - Follow up. If a reply is expected and none is forthcoming,
e-mail once more and then follow up with a call.
All these tools will help the mail to get through, but the
surest means of evading spam filters remains, by happy coincidence,
the smartest way of doing public relations. That is: Form real
relationships. E-mail that continues an ongoing conversation, and
delivers a specific message to a ready individual will in most
cases pass safely through the gauntlet.
"If you are going to write to someone, make it original and make
it targeted," O'Brien says. "You don't want this to be treated as
spam, so don't make it spam."
Contacts: Mark J. Grossman, 631.563.4400 x104, [email protected]; Bonnie J.
Hilliard, 330.342.7964, [email protected];
Brian Hoyt, 202.775.2646, [email protected]; Jeanne Norberg,
765.494.2084, [email protected]; Mike O'Brien,
619.400.8049, [email protected]; Natalie N. Ray,
713.386.1512, [email protected]
Dissenting opinion
Many in the PR community are frustrated by spam filters.
Journalists don't want to be pitched by phone or fax, and now the
one remaining means of access is being blocked. But not everyone is
complaining.
"I think the filters are a good thing," says Brian Hoyt, deputy
director of issues management at Brodeur Worldwide. "As
practitioners of public relations, the art of using the phone and
speaking to members of the press is a lost art. Too many in our
industry have relied on e-mail as a way to communicate to the
media.
"While one might argue that while you can cast a larger net
sending out mass e-mails to the press, the relationships you need
to build with reporters to sell a story are better formed by
actually speaking with them, getting to know the journalist and
their needs on a day-to-day basis."