I ran into this video while searching for my colleague Stephen Davies, who shares his name with a PR consultant based in the UK. The PR Davies has created a video which compares the PR industry’s spam problem to air pollution:

Davies understands correctly that the more spam that exists in the world the less effective narrowly targeted, properly done press releases will be. In this way, spam truly is like pollution because it’s truly harming everyone involved.

Pollution is commonly associated with what is known as the “tragedy of the commons,” a theory advanced by Garrett Hardin that states that individuals will often deplete or a destroy a shared resource even when it’s not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen. Hardin suggested the only way this sort of dilemma can be solved is by privatizing the resource or by government regulating the use of that resource.  Government has already tried regulating spam, and we’ve all seen how incredibly effective that’s been.

Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Laureates in Economics, shows privatization/regulation is a false dichotomy.  Common pool resources can be preserved through rules that are agreed upon by the community that shares the resource.  Davies seems to be suggesting this sort of solution—establishing a new set of PR industry norms that include a disdain for spam, or what he calls “irrelevance.”

While I think Davies is right to suggest that PR people scorn spam, he needn’t only rely on PR pros acting selflessly for the good of their profession.  Instead, he should be pointing out these three entirely selfish reasons why PR spam hurts the spammer:

1. Trust and Reputation – Providing value and quality is invaluable in the PR profession—spam destroys that trust and reputation.  For example, let say that Brand X is sending out press releases for new products.  In one quarter they release a new television, gaming system, MP3 player, and netbook computer—in that order.  They send a press release for every product to the same broad list of consumer electronics reporters and editors, rather than targeting each press release to the folks who cover only that specific product category.  Product journalists who cover only portable devices (like the MP3 player and netbook) would have no reason to trust Brand X as they would have received press releases about televisions and video games—topics entirely irrelevant to them—before ever receiving something they could use.  Brand X is working against itself by being overly broad and non-targeted, establishing themselves as irrelevant in the minds of the very journalists they’re trying to reach.
2. Feedback & Measurement – Overly broad mailings distort the feedback mechanisms that allow PR professionals to improve the quality of their press releases or other bulk emails.  Filling a list with email addresses of people who maybe, kinda, sorta, might be interested in what you have to say is not only illegal, it also adds a tremendous amount of noise to your internal statistics.  Open rates, click-throughs, bounces, unsubscribes—all these numbers become next to worthless when you’re unsure of how interested in your material your recipients were in the first place.  Somewhere in every bloated email list is a core group of people who really value your mailings, but are unable to have their voices heard.
3. Opportunity Cost – Emailing is a matter of managing your time, not just your lists.  We all have a finite amount of time to dedicate to building our email lists.  You can either spend that limited time scraping websites for low-value, low-quality email addresses of people with whom you haven’t established any sort of relationship, or you can spend your time looking for trusted members of the community you’re trying to reach and working to establish a professional relationship with them.  Establishing relationships with folks who already have a large following and then occasionally asking them to link to your material or include your pitch in their email newsletters can create opportunities to expose your message to a whole new group of a people.  If you have an easy means for that new audience to become part of your following—quick email sign-ups, RSS feeds, a link to Twitter or Facebook—then some portion of that new audience can become a high-value part of your own lists.

Because these entirely selfish reasons exist for PR pros to avoid spamming and instead concentrate on high-value relationship building, perhaps Davies should redirect his efforts.  Instead of labeling PR spam as a “tragedy of the commons,” like pollution, he should be calling it a tragedy of incompetence.

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