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February 19, 2009

Three quarters of the PR email I receive is irrelevant. Why?

By Josh Bernoff

As promised in previous posts, here is the analysis of all the PR emails I got in the last half of January.

For the record, I really like working with PR people, I just don’t like all of their tactics. If you find this to be a bit too much navel-gazing, perhaps you're right. But after 14 years as an analyst, I've received tens of thousands of these emails, and I thought it was time to look into how effective they might be, how they got to me, and why. My intent is not to bash PR, but to provide some data we can gnaw on as we think about how much effort goes into this activity, and what value might come out the other end.

When reading this, keep in mind that as an analyst, I get many of the same types of emails as reporters. My inbox probably looks like other "influencers" -- people, including bloggers and analysts and authors, that companies want to reach, especially because reporters and customers may ask our opinion. This is not an attempt to replace our professional advice to analyst relations people, as provided by my colleague Kevin Lucas. It's just a personal response to what I see every day.

Methodology. For a two week period, January 15-28, I tracked every single PR email I received, a total of 114 emails regarding 88 different companies. I didn’t count PR emails trapped in my spam filter. I sent each emailer a reply with a short personal note and a request for more information on how they use email for PR -- more on those responses later.

Results

  • Relevance. I'm starting with this since it's the most instructive. It's purely subjective, but since I'm the target, I get to judge it. Amazingly (I never counted before) more than one in Pr_relevance five of the emails I got were completely irrelevant, like the German-language newsletter and the release that reveals "Tony Duquette Files Infringement Suit Against Michael Kors.” Who are Tony and Michael? I have no idea, although Tony is apparently dead and his company designs clothing. About half related to industries I used to cover; I haven't been a TV analyst for a full two years, but apparently once you're on the list, you're on the list. The remaining 27 emails at least had a shot at relevance, and a total of four of them (4%) were actually interesting news I would look into.

Significance. This is just sad. An awful lot of effort is going into sending me the three-quarters of PR emails in my inbox that have little or no relevance to me, to my clients, or to you. This makes the whole PR industry look bad -- it's the tragedy of the commons, and the reason that Chris Anderson and boing boing had to fight back against the onslaught. Please stop the waste and spend your effort reaching out to people, personally, who are likely to care.

  • Sources. Pr_from 57% of the emails came directly from somebody at the company being promoted. The rest were evenly split between PR firms and mailing services (either wire services or emailing service providers like Constant Contact).

Significance: Companies both large and small feel they can do this themselves. The big guys are professionals. The little guys save some money this way, but don't tend to be as professional in how they handle lists.

  • Timing. This was an interesting time period to review since it included a holiday and the very big event of Barack Obama's inauguration. The most popular day to send PR emails was the day after inauguration day (since, I suppose, it included all those releases that didn't go out on the previous two days).Pr_days

Significance. What day it is doesn't matter to me, but it does to those who work for weekly magazines, which is why Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the most popular.

  • Personal touches. 56% of the emails came from a person, while 29% came from an obvious machine address. (The rest came from a machine address with a person's name attached.) 15% had my name in the body, the rest did not. Three of the 114 emails had a delivery priority of high.

Significance: Neither I nor anyone else receiving these emails is stupid enough to think that the personal touch of adding a name by itself makes a difference. As for the delivery priority, that's just silly -- whatever you have to say, it's not that important. (If you tell me that adding a name or boosting the delivery priority increases the open rate, I would ask if that is a true measure of anything of value in PR emails.) However, when you say "Josh, I read your latest piece on . . ." (and get it right), I will pay more attention. I can recognize a PR email a mile away so the From address doesn't affect this, but an email from a person has one big advantage: if I am a little interested, I am far more likely to respond by hitting "reply".

  • Getting off the list. Two-thirds included an instruction to unsubscribe, either a link to click or text Pr_unsub_4 along the lines of "If you no longer wish to receive emails from this company, respond to this message . . ." Every single email from a mailing service or a wire service included the appropriate instruction, because these services know the spam rules. PR agencies were the most likely to omit such an instruction.

Significance: I am an analyst, I am not your friend. This is not an informal little note to a bunch of your friends, it is a PR email. The implied but unwritten message "you can always email me if you have a problem" is not sufficient; I would respect you a lot more if you had the nerve to include an instruction like "if these sorts of emails aren't relevant to you, email me back and let me know." If what you've sent me is interesting, that won't be a problem. If it isn't, you've at least shown me that you respect me. (One PR agency that I think is among the best convened a meeting after receiving my little survey, and decided they would change their policy in just this way.)

  • Format. About one fourth of the emails were newsletters. Another 44% were releases of some Pr_format kind -- some with a note, and some with a link in place of the release text. 14% were promotions of an event of some kind, and another 14% were just a note.

Significance. A newsletter is a fine way to package up a bunch of information. But since I didn't care that much about most of these companies, this just made it a package in a nicely formatted box that's easy to ignore. Of the "news" formats, the note is the best for me -- it's informal, interesting to read, and likely to spark interest in me (especially if the note really is personal). A note with a release is better than a release. Most releases have so little news content in proportion to the number of words, they're the bran muffin of PR techniques -- and these days, statistically speaking, the little news nuggets don't tend to be very interesting. (I love those ones about how somebody's CEO is speaking at an event, or somebody got a customer -- that's a real sign of desperation, folks.)

I am contributing this in an attempt to be constructive. PR professionals, show it to your boss or your client when they insist on the broadest possible distribution. Channel your energy into targeted, personal outreach to a few people whom you care about and know about, and you’ll do much better. And our inboxes will thank you.

Coming soon: what I learned from the 18 people who answered my survey.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 02:14 PM in How to be a human, Josh's posts, PR | | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

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January 14, 2009

A day in the life of my inbox -- and when email marketing is spam

by Josh Bernoff

Inbox_3 As I contemplate what it means to be a human in all modes of communication -- including email -- I realized that I need some context. Is my mailbox really as full of offensive messages as it seems? How many?

So yesterday, 1/13/2009, I undertook an analysis of everything that landed in my inbox that day. It's revealing in itself.

Let's be clear hear. My inbox is probably very different from yours, unless you're a journalist, analyst, or popular blogger. People like me get a lot more pitches, press releases, and the like. That's the part of this I find most interesting -- looking at what comes into that inbox from marketers and making that conversation more human.

What is spam and what is marketing?

You've seen plenty of definitions for spam and email marketing. But this is personal with me, so I'm making up my own.

spam is email sent to masses of people and no targeting, with an expectation that very few will respond, and no consideration for whether people will be offended

email marketing is email that is sent to a carefully chosen group of people with the expectation of forming or extending a relationship

This is not black and white, it is a continuum, based on how much you care. If you do your "email marketing" and care only a little about relationships, you are close to a spammer.

Notice that my email marketing definition also includes not only "traditional" email marketing but press releases and PR emails, since they are sent to groups and hope to form relationships. This is a specialized and frequently abused form of email marketing.

Basic statistics

Yesterday was pretty light, no special events like CES or MacWorld. Here is what I received on January 13:

  • 107 emails to Forrester Outlook inbox (includes 1 spam)
  • 23 emails to my gmail address (includes 16 spam caught by gmail). I use this address for personal emails and when I'm acting as a consumer and not a business person.
  • 75 emails caught by Forrester's spam blocker Postini, of which 71 were actual spam and 4 were not.

Totals: 205 emails, 88 spam, 117 non spam. The base for the rest of this post is the 117.

What's in my inbox?

In rough order from largest to smallest bunches:

  • 27 (23%) were personal emails, to me or a few people including me. 21 were from coworkers and 6 were from outside. Only one of the outside emails was unsolicited -- it was from a guy named Lars Leafblad in Minneapolis who wrote a bunch of notes about Groundswell and mailed it to 80 of his friends. I found that pretty interesting.
  • 22 (19%) were traditional email marketing. Three of these were directly relevant to me as a customer with information about my account -- for example, with airline miles updates and a note from E*Trade. The other 19 were solicitations and "updates" from companies that have my name. 7 were for events. None of the 19 interested me.
  • 18 (15%) were PR pitches or press releases. Of these:
    • 10 were press releases
    • 2 were releases with a note at the top from the PR person
    • 3 were notes from PR with no release
    • 1 was a newsletter
    • 1 was about an earnings call (more on that later).
  • Interestingly, 10 of the 18 had no unsubscribe link. What's the protocol here? PR people assume that we'll just respond and say "take me off the list" but 6 of the 10 with no unsubscribe link were press releases that didn't look like that would work. Only 4 of the press releases and pitches included a note to "give me a call if you are interested." What were they about? Hard to remember (there's a cautionary note). They include:
    • 2 copies each of Dish Network's 2 releases (why two copies?)
    • Tivo response to Dish in their patent lawsuit -- that was at least moderately amusing. Of course I haven't covered DVRs since 2006.
    • Carlos Carvajal of Vignette's heartfelt note about why they're cancelling their user conference was nice and personal, but I don't really cover Vignette.
    • Blake Cahill's beautifully formatted newsletter about Visible Technologies which was quickly passed over, along with the traditional releases, since there's rarely useful information in newsletter and press release formats -- they get maybe 5 seconds of my attention.
    • BL Ochman's note about being tapped as an expert on the presidential choice of dog, which was funny, I had no idea she had this knowledge.
    • "Newport Coast Investments Acquires Assets & Intellectual Property of Product Placement Firm NextMedium." How did I get on this list? It's symbolic of the whole bunch, which taken together had about two and half minutes of relevance to me. What a waste.
  • 9 (8%) were a result of a mistake at Google. Google's investor relations announcement email was misconfigured so that every reply was forwarded to the whole list. In other words, you didn't need to make the "reply all" mistake, they did it for you! So I, along with hundreds of others, got emails that said "please take me off this list" and "why am I getting these random emails." Still more email pollution and wasted time, but at least this one was funny to watch. Just their bad luck to have this happen on the day I was tracking email. (I've seen this happen 3 times in 13 years of being an analyst. It's always a blast to observe.)
  • 9 (8%) were calendar invitations or cancellations.
  • 8 (7%) were CCs on other people's internal conversations. About half of these were relevant to me.
  • 8 (7%) were internal mass emails from people at Forrester. Most of these were borderline irrelevant, but I understand the need for them. You need to know that somebody is going to replace your office chair, and why the bad smell is coming down from the 8th floor. These email lists gets abused occasionally, but not very much, which is good since we have 1000 people now.
  • 6 (5%) were BACN from other sites. I should turn most of this off, but I'm too lazy.
  • 6 (5%) were news digests. Two are SmartBriefs. I find these useful.
  • 4 (4%) were automated messages. One was an out of office and 3 were from Outlook about how full my mailbox is.

In case you are wondering I sent 35 emails out myself. 24 were personal to one or a small group of people and 11 were responses to meeting invitations.

Lessons from this exercise

I'm not out to get you. I'm not going to do what Chris Anderson did. But I did learn a few things:

Less than half my email is of any interest to me, even after the spam blockers block the obvious spam. And unlike John Wanamaker, I know which half. For the people in the other half (both inside my company and outside) why are you wasting my time?

Nearly all of the pitches and releases sent my way fail. I bet that is true for most journalists as well. PR pros, tell me this: why isn't it better to spend your money reaching out intimately to a dozen people instead of sending mail to 1000? Aren't most of these press releases and notes a waste of my time and yours?

Not including unsubscribe on any mass email is a big mistake. It's not just the law, it's stupid, because it annoys people who you are trying to impress. Will I hold it against you? Yes I will. Stay tuned.

I'd welcome comments from the PR community about what you're doing to improve things.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 10:30 AM in Email, How to be a human, Josh's posts, PR | | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

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April 03, 2007

Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool . . .

by Josh Bernoff

The quote is remarkably hard to track down (even Yahoo answers and WikiQuote don't have a definitive answer) but best I can tell it's Mark Twain who said:

Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Today's topic is how automated tools and email in the hands of the lazy can make you look like a fool. And as you well know, with today's connected world, the slightest foolishness (say, a snoring cable installer) can make you famous for being clueless.

I've deleted the names in most of these examples, not because the perpetrators deserve protection, but because there are so many people making these mistakes, it's not fair to single out individuals.

As an analyst I get a lot of PR-type email. 90% of it is harmless -- of no interest to me or, sometimes I think, anyone, so I just delete it. Someone is spending a lot of PR money telling me that their CEO is talking at a conference, or that they finally got a customer. I'm sorry you spend the time to tell me what is not news, but that's okay.

5% is actually interesting to me and I ask for a followup or mark it in some way. My 5% is not the same as your 5%, but email is free, so why not send it to all of us. Figuring out which stuff I should get would take a lot more time than just sending me anything. Hey, I'm sure your time is much more important than mine. In 12 years as an analyst I've gotten on a lot of mailing lists.

The other 5% is the stuff that is actively harmful to PR clients' reputations. There are the sloppy mistakes, like the press releases with the MS Word edit markups still in there (why did they cross out that sentence about having GM as a client? Hmm. Must be a secret). But by far the most interesting are the people who, in an attempt to say "Good morning Josh" and get me to look say something else instead.

For example, I received a missive about a music festival (who put me on that list?) that began this way:

From: [Name deleted to protect the guilty]
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2007 3:32 PM
To: Bernoff, Josh

Subject: Interview Inquiry- [Deleted] Music & Arts Festival

Hey 617 613 57nn

I wanted to let you know about the [Deleted] Apple Music & Arts Festival . . .

Let's do the math. Let's assume that putting my name in the body of the email makes me 5% more likely to read it. So, is it worth that 5% boost when (based on the releases that land in my inbox) there is also a 5% chance you'll make an error and say "Hey 617 617 57nn" and prove yourself to be too lazy to figure out how your own mass email program works? This stands out way more than my name. And you have just "removed all doubt." (The real one had my actual phone number in it.)

Then there was this:

From: [Name deleted]
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 12:00 PM
Subject: Dinner Invite

Just in case you were planning on attending the CCBN Cable Show in Beijing at the end of this month, I wanted to extend an invitation to you to join [deleted] at a Dinner Banquet on Saturday evening, March 31st, at the . . .

Warm regards, [name deleted]

This sounds nice enough, but notice there is no "To:" line. It was sent to a blind mailing list. I and an unspecified random collection of people must be pretty important to get this dinner invitation, but apparently not important enough to get mailed by name. But I know they think I'm important anyway, because of the "Warm Regards" at the end. By the way, this vendor makes a piece of communications equipment that I use in my house that needed to be rebooted yesterday, maybe they knew this was coming . . .

If you're still reading, good, because I saved the best one for last.

Ces_sample_graphic The Consumer Electronics Association sent me a mailing a few weeks ago (they mail all of us who attend their conferences with all manner of stuff, it seems like weekly). They were testing a marketing program for their international conference (CES) next year. Sure, 140,000 people go to CES every year so I don't know why they need to work so hard to market it, but they deserve credit for checking in with us. So I took a little Web survey. One of the choices we were being asked to evaluate in their survey was the graphic shown here.

Charitably, this graphic is a reminder that when you go to CES, the taxi lines are 45 minutes long. Is this really the image they want to reinforce? It's so bad that for the last two years I rented a bicycle.

Uncharitably, look at that graphic again. Doesn't it create an image in your mind that's more closely associated with crowds of World War II era Germans than consumer electronics? Nah, it can't be, after all, she's smiling . . .

Now the Consumer Electronics Association will tell you that this was just a test, and the kind of connotations I'm talking about would never have made it into their official marketing campaign. But they just emailed it to thousands and thousands of people in their survey. How much more public could it be than that?

Everything you do is public. Everything. Every support rep answering a phone call. Every email, mass or individual. Every customer contact. So check it first. Better to keep your mouth shut and remain a fool . . .

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Posted by Josh Bernoff at 09:36 AM in Josh's posts, PR | | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

February 09, 2007

Pork board vs. Lactivist: everybody wins

Breasttheoriginalwhitemilkby Josh Bernoff

Postscript to the story about The Lactivist, Jennifer Laycock who was asked to stop selling a T-shirt featuring the slogan "The Other White Milk" by a lawyer for the National Pork Board.

The National Pork Board recognized it made a mistake and reversed course instantly. You don't mess with motherhood! Because of its corporate structure the Pork Board can't donate to charities but its employees are now supporting Jennifer's charity, a human milk bank in Ohio. Which is why she was selling the shirts in the first place.

And Laycock, who "respects copyrights" according to her latest blog post, will no longer sell the infringing T-shirt. Her substitute is shown here.

Is there a lesson? Sure. First, everything you do is now public. Every customer support call. Every lawyer's letter. Every sleeping cable guy.

Second, you can make amends if you move quickly. Kudos to the Pork Board for doing so. Now that Laycock isn't in the crosshairs anymore, she's unlikely to try to make this any bigger.

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Posted by Josh Bernoff at 02:17 AM in Blogs, PR | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 05, 2007

Pork board vs. breastfeeding moms: No contest

by Josh Bernoff
Lactivist_1 I'm sorry. I couldn't resist. I had to weigh in on this one simply because it's such a mismatch.

Jennifer Laycock, a mom and blogger in Ohio, is a "Lactivist" -- that is, a mother who wants to support and promote breastfeeding. I know a litte bit about this -- I've been helping out La Leche League, an international organization that promotes breastfeeding because it's better for babies.

To raise money, Jennifer made a promotional T-shirt for "The Other White Milk." I'd like to show you a-picture but I can't find one. Why? Because the National Pork Board sent her a cease and desist letter because they felt she was infringing their slogan, "The Other White Meat."

Continue reading "Pork board vs. breastfeeding moms: No contest" »

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 09:08 PM in Blogs, PR | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

January 25, 2007

The key to social PR: actually using your brain

by Josh Bernoff

Seth Godin and Chris Anderson are among those now talking about what PR should be in the world of social media. Part of this debate stems from a description of something new called the "social media release" or SMR, as described by Brian Solis.

Now an SMR as described by Solis looks to me like an advance on the old-fashioned press release, but if you really want effective PR you need something more. And with due respect to Anderson, the editor of Wired, I don't think the answer is to train your executive to know the ins and outs of social media. (Although if your company wants help with that, call me!)

As a frequent target of PR pitches for the last 11 years -- and occasional helper in development of our clients' media plans -- I think I have a right to an opinion here. (News flash: blogger claims right to an opinion!) Anyway here is the prescription for success.

1. Have a good product (or service, or Web site, or whatever). (I know, PR can't influence this. But more coverage of a lame product just kills it faster.)

2. Figure out what it is about the product that actually improves the life of the customer. And what makes it different. (Gee, this is what marketers and PR people were doing all along. Still valuable.)

3. Approach influencers and journalists that actually care about and know about the topic. This includes bloggers. If it's about TV, talk to Lost Remote. If it's Web 2.0 talk to Michael Arrington. Now these are trivial examples, but if you're a half decent PR person you have to know who these people are in your client's space, the same way you know who the analysts, trade journalists, and business journalists are in that space.

4. Use these press/social media releases, phone calls, personal contacts, emails to get ahold of those folks, hook 'em, and then put them in touch with the executives at the client. Clearly this also involves coaching those executives.

If your metric is how many articles you get written and how many analyst briefings you got taken, this isn't the best way to do it. But that's a stupid metric anyway in this day, since it doesn't reflect the influence of the people doing the coverage on the product's image and sales.

If, on the other hand, your metric is how many influential (= read by your customers) people say interesting (= thought provoking, original) things about your client's product, then this ought to work fine. Becuase the more influential people are saying interesting things, the more reverberation you get in the blogosphere, in mainstream media, in discussion groups -- this is what gets things rolling. Then the PR person has done their job.

So, the long-suffering PR person still has to do much the same job, plus knowing about social media in the client's space, and helping the client with that. That's what I mean by using your brain. Many PR people do have them, you know.

To all the PR people reading this blog -- did I get it right?

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Posted by Josh Bernoff at 08:55 PM in PR | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)