I get a lot of junk email. Apart from the spam I get many irrelevant press releases and invites from advertising, marketing and public relations agencies. They obviously employ some ignorant person to scour food blogs for email addresses, which they add into their CRM. There’s evidently little or no checking of the sites to see whether they should be marketed to.
The worst offender in Melbourne is, in my experience, Hot House media and events (HHME). I’ve received emails from them before that I’ve simply deleted, but in June this year things started to become more annoying. I received an email from John Flower attaching a press release about a food event in Venice. Not interested. Irrelevant.
I replied and requested to be removed from their list. John replied that he would comply. But in July another email arrived from Clarence Chen from HHME asking me for my advertising rates. I’ve already written about that. I told him what I thought of his vacuity and hoped that would be the last of the junk email, but no.
In August I received an email from Lizzie Ee at HHME attaching a press release for a Melbourne event. I replied, saying ‘how many times do I have to tell your company to take me OFF your email list? Do it now!’ She replied to confirm that my email had been removed from their list, but I don’t trust her.
These PR goons are too stupid to comply with privacy laws. They are legally required to comply with requests to cease unwanted contact, and there are consequences for breaches of privacy. If it happens again, I am tempted to make an even bigger example of them. They desperately need to read and follow this advice for marketing goons in how to deal with food bloggers.
22 September 2010 at 1:07 pm
hey Brian,
pardon me for the conflict of intent given the subject of the post, &/so of course feel free not to publish this off-topic comment, but i noticed your comment about spam.
i’ve used www dot junkemailfilter dot com for over a year now, totally happy with the service, spam is a rarity now. you change your domain’s DNS MX record to their servers, they filter, then forward the filtered email on to your email server. seamless, no software to install, no bandwidth consumed by spam.
yes, your email is going through an extra 3rd-party step which might make some uncomfortable from a privacy point of view, but it’s not like email ever was private as it passes through any intermediary steps in the ordinary chain of email servers between you & any given sender anyway.
no i’m not affiliated, just a happy customer :)
cheers, Anthony.
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22 September 2010 at 1:15 pm
Thanks but you have missed the point – marketers are required to abide by Australia’s privacy laws. Requiring an individual like me to use more technology to evade their unlawful attempts to contact me is irrelevant. When marketers fail to meet their legal obligations to respect my privacy then I am encouraged to expose their failings.
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27 November 2010 at 9:10 am
Used to work in PR, and it’s pretty chaotic (still do, sortof). There’s a habit of dumping the new kids (recent graduates) in front of computers, given a hundred emails, and told to send out a press release. Managers too busy to look at the exact site. Clients want results, you’re hitting 7pm and still in the office, mush mush, etc.
And see, PR folks often don’t spend time reading the blogs, sending anything relevant, because it’s they’ve got more email lists to build, and 200 other things to do. Low pay doesn’t help with the motivation, either. Hit and miss, most of the time.
It’s the big firms who usually do this. Small firms, if run well, can do the blog thing better. I still keep in touch some bloggers I met during PR days (the same bloggers the account managers dismiss as too small to care about…but see, the small folk are the ones who actually care about their writing. The News Ltd journos just want to finish the day and go home.)
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