Fighting Back Against PR Spam

A few months ago, Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson blasted public relations companies for spamming him with irrelevant media pitches - echoing the sentiments of many other journalists. As an act of punishment, he also posted the email addresses of the spammers on his blog (thus opening them up to becoming targets of spam themselves from data-mining bots that would, ironically, deliver them to the lists of other spammers).

The move caused something of a stir in the PR world, as some of the domains blocked belonged to some of the biggest names in the world of public relations firms.

The issue has resurfaced again as blogger Matt Haughey has done the same thing, publicly admonishing PR spammers. The interesting note is that Gina Trapani of Lifehacker has had enough too, and went the extra step of setting up a wiki site so that journalists and editors can post the domain names of notorious public relations spammers to make the process of blocking that spam easier (as it can be directly uploaded into a spam filter's blacklist).

Though I work in PR, ultimately I side with the writers/editors. In this day and age, with access to the Internet and services like Bacon's online, there's really no excuse for the "shotgun" approach to press releases. Everything is personalized now (as the suffering broadcast and print media are learning) and the dinosaurs need to take note or slip further into the inky black tar pit of irrelevance.

Sure, it's tough as a PR pro to say 'no' to a client that wants you to blast everyone in the world with a release about their product (it's even harder to talk them out of a release altogether when they have something that is not at all newsworthy), but you have to do it for their sake and yours. It hurts your reputation and theirs to hit unreceptive audiences with an irrelevant message, which could turn them off to future messages from you that are spot-on.

Errol Morris and Lens Culture

I'm reading a profile in Wired about documentary filmmaker Errol Morris ("the Interrogator,"May 16, 2008, by David Samuels, p. 127) and instantly like him as a result of this passage:

"Morris was initially rejected by every college he applied to, and he was later thrown out of graduate programs at UC Berkeley and Princeton. He remains a failed graduate student at heart, delighting in the pure play of ideas, with the secondary aim of exasperating any responsible adults in the room."

I've decided that if I'm permitted to teach COM 320 "Vision and Culture" again at GVSU, I'm going to incorporate Morris' film "Standard Operating Procedure" about the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib) into the course because it covers precisely what we discuss about the perils of living in a "lens culture" with the illusion of truth captured within the frame of an image. This passage, describing his upcoming book Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?, sounds fascinating:

"Many of Morris' blog posts reflect his interest in the ways that photographs presented as pure, objective documentation of reality are often staged and manipulated, like those from Abu Ghraib. Morris answers his more lively and particular commenters at length, weaving together the comments and annotating them in a loopy, digressive, but rigorous way that a friend, writer Ron Rosenbaum, has identified as an entirely new form of essay."

It sounds like Morris may be paving the way for the type of book that I would like to write given that it's the medium I so frequently participate in. Very exciting.

Boolify Makes Learning to Use Search Engines Easy

One of the most important skills any student (or any professional for that matter) can have is the ability to use search engines to access the limitless potential of the Internet. In fact, it's far less important that students learn rote facts in school than it is that they learn how to FIND those facts (and how to think critically and apply them).

Enter Boolify (named for George Boole, who discovered a system for algebraic system of logic that is widely used in computer science). Boolify uses a visual drag-and-drop interface of puzzle pieces to teach people how to think about crafting Internet searches using Boolean operators. While you build your search, below the results are pulled from Google and displayed so you can monitor how each new component modifies the results. It's brilliant.

Boolify.org

Mother Jones Reports on PR Firms That Paid Former Spies to Infiltrate Activist Groups

Black Ops on Green Groups: Private Security Firm Run by Fmr. Secret Service Officers Spied on Environmental Orgs for Corporate Clients
Democracy Now! | April 14, 2008
"A private security firm spied on Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and several other environmental organizations from the late 1990s until at least the year 2000, according a new investigation by Mother Jones magazine. The security firm was run by former Secret Service officers who infiltrated environmental groups, collected their phone records and confidential internal documents, and even went through their trash. The information was then passed on to public relations firms and corporations involved in environmental controversies. We speak with the reporter who broke the story, James Ridgeway." [More]

The public relations industry appears to have carved a unique niche out for itself as the go-betweens for corporations and entities that offer services that are either outright illegal, or at the very least deeply unethical. Their ability to act as an intermediary offers the corporations plausible deniability (they can just say that the PR firm was off the reservation), and it offers the service vendors yet another layer of insulation from public scrutiny. The most common form of this practice is astroturf groups, but counterinsurgency (well documented by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in Toxic Sludge is Good for You) and laundering political donations are also common. The latter of which was actually the basis for one of the storylines in the short-lived HBO series "K Street."

Despite all of the various recent ethical violations by Ketchum, they remain one of the chief patrons of the Public Relations Society of America which has criticized these practices, but done nothing to sanction its own membership for utilizing them. Lest one think that this sort of thing is an abstract national issue, I would remind you that this sort of thing is (allegedly) going on at all levels - even here in Michigan (as illustrated by this case study).

The Pimping of .EDU

It's becoming standard operating procedure for power brokers (be they corporations or politicians) to attempt to ape the qualities of positively-perceived institutions rather than to build a better mousetrap. Astroturf groups are a great example. Rather than improve standards and refine quality, corporate America will dumb down the definition of "organic" so their factory-produced, bioengineered products apply. Rather than actually commit to sustainable practices, corporations contort the definition of "green" so that their decidedly unsustainable practices apply.

Interestingly, "Intelligent Design" [ie creationism] is using this same tactic; trying to dumb down the definition of "science" so that anything applies - including non-falsifiable, cultural mythology.

This is another move in that same sad direction; trying to couch [deceptive] advertising messages in the credible sheep's clothing of educational institutions. Woe to the republic.