Social Networking

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.

Google Buzz has only been live for five days, but it’s already created controversy, undergone major revamps, and gained millions of users. If this is Google’s attempt to take on Facebook and Twitter, it looks as though Google has succeeded in more ways than it might have hoped—in their first week with a live product, the Buzz team has already experienced many of the same growing pains felt by its rivals.

Thankfully, Google’s Buzz Team has been quick to address some of the privacy concerns expressed by users.  The biggest privacy issue with Buzz has centered around follow lists.  Upon sign-up, users automatically became followers of their most frequent Gmail contacts and those contacts became part of a public list so that others could see who you were following.  For Gmail users who never had any expectation that their contacts would ever become public, this was troubling to say the least.  For some users, the shared lists were embarrassing or even compromising to their careers or safety.

Countless stories have already been published about Gmail users being horrified that their ex-girlfriend, psychiatrist, or the HR rep from a rival company were suddenly made part of a public list.  One blogger expressed her horror in finding that her boyfriend’s name had been made public so that everyone, including her  serially violent ex-husband, knew the identify of the new man her life.

Fortunately, users can turn off this feature fairly easily—check out the tip below—and Google has announced that it has replaced the auto-follow feature with an auto-suggest feature and it has made opting-out of publicly sharing your contact list a much more prominent part of the sign-up process.

Google also announced in the same blog post that it will also be creating a Google Buzz setting tab within Gmail, something I had suggested upon first using the products as its unclear how to change many of Buzz’s settings after the initial sign-up process is completed.

Google should consider adding Connected Sites to this box as it would then be a comprehensive collection of Buzz settings.

Tips

1. Turn Off Contact Sharing

You don’t have to let the privacy kerfuffle dissuade you from using Buzz, you just need to be aware of how to control what information Buzz displays.  You can easily disable contact sharing by visiting your Google Profile page:

2. Edit Your Connected Sites

I found this menu a bit illusive, so here’s a quick highlight:

3. Email Buzz

If you want to post something to Buzz from your phone or another locale where you don’t have access to full-fledged Gmail, just email your post to buzz@gmail.com.

4. Subscribe via RSS

Every buzzer has an RSS feed, so if you want to follow people via RSS or display your Buzz feed—or anyone’s feed—on your website or blog, it’s just like using any other RSS feed.  However, there aren’t any RSS icons to be found within buzz, or even on profile pages, but your browser’s RSS detection should pick up on the Buzz feed on a Google Profile page:

For more on how to use Google Buzz, check out the Gmail help page on Buzz.