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Public relations spammers

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, corporate communications, corporatelife, marketing, Personal, PR, Public Relations, spam, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Spam techniques have now become standard in public relations. I’ve come to this realization over the last couple of years as I’ve watched the dozens of emails from communication managers that arrive daily in my mailbox. Probably, the senders don’t think of what they are doing as spamming. Very likely, some even imagine that they are doing their jobs efficiently. Yet they might as well be spammers, for all the effectiveness they have. An increasing majority seem to think they’ve done their job if they’ve sent their news to every remotely possible recipient.

This attitude frequently has ludicrous results. For instance, you might think that one look at the free software sites for which I write would tell PR hacks what the sites are interested in: Free and open source software, and the GNU/Linux operating system especially. Yet out of an average of maybe sixty news releases that I receive daily, at least two-thirds of them on any given day are likely to contain news about the Windows or Mac platforms or proprietary software – often both. Either the PR people don’t know enough about technology to know that the editors don’t want this news, or they don’t care.

Even more surprisingly, some releases aren’t about computer technology at all. Probably the senders are working from a general list of news outlets, and haven’t bothered to figure out which ones might want their news.

Then, just to make matters worse, they don’t just send the initial release. Some of them send exactly the same release the next day. Others send “just a note to see if you got my news yesterday.” A few repeat the process several times with every release.

Some, having picked up the idea that they should target a name, address their news directly to a person who works for the site. The only trouble is, they never bother updating their contact lists. I know at least one site that regularly gets email addressed to people who haven’t worked there for several years – sometimes in addition to the general ones sent to the editors’ mailing list.

All in all, it’s getting so bad that my little finger is getting repetitive stress injuries from hitting the delete key so many times in a day.

Admittedly, the sender don’t conceal their names or use malware to send email from other people’s computers, but, if what they’re doing isn’t spamming, the difference is hard to distinguish.

In particular — and what really should concern the senders – the results they get are the same as those from spam. Before long, their emails are added to everyone’s spam filters, so if they ever do have news the site can use, nobody is every going to read it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some writers and editors resist using information from certain PR agencies or people, simply because they’ve become so annoyed by them.

Yet when someone – usually out of cynicism or a wicked sense of amusement – lets the senders know that they’re wasting their time, most of them don’t change their behavior. They’ll apologize, express their gratitude for the correction – and then, at the very next opportunity, do exactly the same thing. I sometimes wonder whether the effectiveness of PR these days is being judged by the number of outlets it’s sent to.

When a news release is sent out, the ideal situation is that the news is used. The company gets the publicity it wants, and the news outlet gets the material it needs. But, when spamming techniques are used, nobody wins. The PR hack gets unofficially blacklisted, the company fails to get its publicity, and the journalists get angry and look for copy elsewhere. And why? Because too many PR hacks are too lazy or ignorant to do their jobs properly.

Needless to say, not every communications manager uses spam techniques. I know several who carefully target their news releases, and work hard to make sure that everyone on both ends of a release wins. These are the real pros of communications, and I am always grateful for their competence – if only because of its increasing rarity.

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The CEO who wanted passionate employees

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, corporatelife, employers, employment, jobs, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 18, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“I wish people would come to work with enthusiasm,” the CEO said to me, looking up from his copy of From Good to Great. “I really wish they showed some passion.” His voice was a mixture of puzzlement, longing, and frustration that could only come from a man wondering why the rest of the world wasn’t more like him.

The statement shouldn’t have caught me as unprepared as it did. As a communications consultant, I didn’t even show on the organizational chart, but I’d noted before that executives often feel free to confide in a consultant in a way they’d never consider with an employee. Besides, we were sharing an office until the company could take over more space on the same floor, and it was a hot Friday afternoon, a time when even the most gung-ho company officer takes off his jacket and feels conversational.

All the same, the statement left me dumbfounded for a minute. What I wanted to say was, “You mean you really don’t know?” But I settled for something non-committal and corporate about teams taking time to build. After all, consultants may have more freedom than employees, but wise ones learn to temper that freedom with discretion.

Besides, the fact he could express the wish — and the puzzlement behind it — made all too clear that he didn’t know how much he was responsible for the lack of enthusiasm.

You see, the CEO in question had been recruited by the board of directors to make the company profitable. And he had done everything he could from a business end to achieve that goal, finding new markets and products, and developing business intelligence about the company’s industry and local business. However, what he had forgot was his responsibility for morale.

Frankly, it couldn’t have been worse.

The CEO had come in six months ago, and quickly proceeded to cut a third of the staff. About a month ago, he had done the same again, and anyone who could read a balance sheet and his worried glance could tell that another staff reduction was due in the future.

All these cuts made sense from a bottom line perspective, but they left employees uncertain. The stress was even greater because he had closed a branch office after promising to keep it open, and fired everyone who wasn’t willing to relocate to headquarters.

Moreover, even at headquarters, he had laid off people with no regard to their roles within the company. As a result, the survivors were not only wondering when the axe would fall on them, but having to cope with a sudden loss of a lot of unwritten knowledge because key people were gone. In other words, not only was morale so low that the photocopy machine was starting to jam from the rush of resumes, but the company had become less functional because of the cuts.

Then, just to make matters worse, having just read Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, Lou Gerstner’s biography of his days at IBM, the CEO was inspired to hold retreats for those he designated key personnel. These chosen few were given free copies of various best-selling business books, and invited to spend a day or two at a resort discussing the contents.

But what might have worked in a mega-corporation like IBM, where a few absences across the country would barely be noticed, only served in the CEO’s small company to make make three-quarters of the company feel under-privileged and insulted. Several of the elite didn’t feel especially honored, either, since what they really wanted to do was get on with their work.

And, after all this, what did the CEO do at Christmas? Cancel the company party, and, on Christmas Eve, leave at 11AM without telling the staff they could do the same (most left anyway by 1PM).

Looking back, I’m pleased at my restraint when the CEO wished for a dedicated work force. He wasn’t a stupid man, yet he had no idea that he couldn’t have ground morale into the dirt more effectively if he had been deliberately tried to do so. Busy satisfying the board that he was containing costs, he forgot that, if he wanted dedication and respect, he also needed to show some loyalty and support for his employees. And, really, considering all his long hours trying to turn the company around, I couldn’t tell him what was wrong or the aspects of business that he was neglecting without mortally insulting him.

The company still exists, but it’s only a remnant of what it was in my time. Despite a couple of modestly profitable quarters, it continues to show regular losses, and the same CEO still heads it. I’ve never revisited, but I sometimes wonder if he’s ever figured out what puzzled him, or simply bemoans the difficulty in attracting loyal personnel.

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Dressing for telecommuting

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, careers, corporatelife, dress-for-success, interviewing, opensource, Personal, phone calls, telecommuting, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2007| 1 Comment »

In yesterday’s Globe and Mail, I read yet another article suggesting that if you work from home, you should dress for important calls as though you were at the office. The idea is that this bit of role-playing will help you to focus on the business at hand and act more professionally.

Well, whatever works. I suppose. But I know that such role-playing doesn’t help me one bit.

Whenever I try such a suggestion, instead of being focused, I’m distracted by the falsity of what I’m doing. Like pretending to agree when I have reservations, or to be in a good mood when I want to dig a hole and fling myself in, dressing for a phone call feels forced and pointless to me. Such efforts do me more harm than good, because I keep thinking I’m being a phony instead of concentrating on the business at hand.

As a result, after trying to play dressup once or twice, I quickly gave up bothering. Now, I happily take calls in my usually working attire: a T-shirt, shorts, and bare feet. A sentence or two into a call, I’m too busy thinking about the issue at hand to waste any worry on what I’m wearing.

Business experts who echo each other on this subject (I’d say “parrot” except that, as the owner of four, I know that they don’t say things mindlessly) would probably say no good could come of my casualness. Yet I think the record speaks for itself. In my casual but sublime outfit, I’ve successfully negotiated the price of a series of ads. I’ve arranged bundling deals for commercial software. I’ve aced job interviews. I’ve successfully interviewed leaders of the free software movement, as well as countless managers and CEOs of national and international corporations. Not one of these people — who must amount to several hundred people over the past eight years — has ever complained that I was anything less than professional and competent.

Under the circumstances, I fail to see why I should spend time ironing a shirt and pants or knotting a tie before a professional call. I could better use my pre-time call making notes of the points I want to cover, or drinking a cup of peppermint tea to help calm myself as I think about strategies.

It would be another story, of course, if I were doing a visual teleconference. But I think that, although the technology for such conferences is now more or less ready, there’s a reason why the idea has never caught on since I first saw a demo as a four year-old-child: few people really want such a thing. Given a choice, most of us, I think, prefer dressing or sitting comfortably while we talk on the phone to whatever minor advantages being seen might confer. Not worrying about such trivialities as our clothes help us to concentrate on what really matters in our telecommuting calls.

That’s not to say that some people might not find dressing up for a call is helpful. I’ve seen too much to believe that everybody responds the same way, so I expect there are people who find that putting on a suit and tie or a pair of nylons helps them when they take business calls from home.

Yet, at the same time, don’t feel that dressing up is compulsory, or a piece of magic that will automatically work for you. In some cases, the effort may only be a distraction.

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