Holyrood Partnership, Edinburgh PR

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Posted this entry on 06/16 at 09:17 AM

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

BBC Scotland News Boss: Spam All My Staff Please

BBC Scotland staff will be loving their boss Atholl Duncan after his appearance at a Gorkana Breakfast Briefing this morning in Edinburgh and he told the 50-plus gathering of PRs that the best way to ensure your story appears in the BBC is to contact as many members of BBC staff as possible.

Holyrood Partnership Edinburgh PR Supremo Scott Douglas will be along shortly to blog about the whole event but I can just see the champagne being popped over at Pacific Quay with the news that they are set to be receiving even more press releases. Not. In an age when most journalists are moaning about the number of press releases they get, the news that they are about to get more won't go down too well.

Now for most it actually shouldn't be a problem as sensible PR people will only contact the relevant reporters and staff (and I'm sure Gorkana will be hoping people use their service to find them), but for others it will no doubt be email hell, followed up by that most amateur of PR actions:  the 'did you get my email' phone call. (seriously people, if you want to make sure they got it, turn on 'delivered' and 'read' receipts in your email) which is just going to lead to some BBC staff getting really hacked off with PRs, souring the whole relationship. There's also a danger that rookie PR operators think 'well if we send a release to everyone at the BBC, let's send it to everyone at every publication' which then leads to everyone being hacked off.

To be fair to Atholl, it's a fair, basic and decent point he makes - you want exposure, you get in touch with lots of people across the multiple BBC services and shows. But if experience has shown us anything, it's that someone will take a kind offer and take it too far. And how long will it be before people start trying to reach Atholl with releases on his numerous web2.0 sites (he's fairly savvy with a presence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn).

Of course, if the BBC really wanted people to get in touch, how about providing contact details with each bylined story on the BBC News website?

(and yes I know he didn't say "spam my staff" but that's how some BBC staff will no doubt see it)

Yeah those are some pretty interesting comments he made but I don’t know how much this is going to impact the staff there….I’d imagine that most people are already “spamming” quite a lot of the staff members at the various news networks so percentage-wise it might not be a big increase. Not only that but the staff could put some clever filters on their email software to push any emails with “press release” or just “release” into a different folder.

Complete waste of time to expect you’ll get a read receipt for an email sent to a media organisation.

Why?

Simple. They turn it off because all it does is double their bandwidth AND tells spammers that a successful delivery is actually a ‘live’ email address that can be spammed.

For info, every email sent to a Trinity Mirror publication, whether that is the Mirror, Record, Stirling Observer or any one of their 300-odd titles across the country goes through their external spam-checker.

That is over 150 MILLION per month. They are already paying bandwidth to receive so they - or any other media organisation - are not going to pay double that for read receipts, particularly when it is also an open invitation to spammers.

What Atholl should have said is that PRs should use a secure, guaranteed delivery service like Newslink which delivers copy - once - in a ready-to-use format directly into the editorial system. All staff logged on to the system see the message. The BBC - including BBC Scotland - have had the service for over 20 years. Simple, secure, guaranteed and definitely spam-free.

I am the Business Development Manager for the service and as I am currently doing a CIPR Post-Graduate Diploma research project into content delivered to newsdesks from the PR sector I can claim to have my finger on the pulse of this particular subject.

Iain, that’s a fair point but surely the issue against systems like Newslink is cost while email is free. And I would imagine that a) those using newslink would still email it out as a backup and b) there’s a lot of organisations don’t use Newslink. After all most PR activity actually goes to specialist press than the tabloids and broadsheets.

pretty interesting site..well maintained keep it up