Institution/identity clash is at the heart of PR spam frustration – and here’s my solution.

There’s really not much to say about this. It’s just a frustrated rant from someone with the power to get away with it. People in PR do it plenty about recruiters, ad sales and other aspiring suppliers.

But the case above illustrates a couple of misdirections that I think particularly plague the journalist/PR divide:

1. It’s easy for a recipient to confuse their institutional identity with their individual identity.
2. The recipient can often misdirect their frustration with the nature of the big, unsolvable problem toward a simpler target.

Institutional vs individual

If your email address ends with an institution’s URL, it’s likely you will be contacted with regard to your role there. Journalists experience an extreme of this.

It’s frustrating, annoying, boring, irritating, disruptive, distracting — but it’s nothing personal. And it’s not going to change. These people are in pursuit of a transaction with the institution you represent, not asking for your hand in marriage.

140 characters of anger are much more easily directed toward something like “I hope you are well”, instead of the real, unsolvable problem. Especially if, like a journalist, you’re naturally aware of your audience (who will be more interested in that than another diatribe against PR spam.)

Where does it go?

It’s not fixable, it doesn’t go anywhere. In fact, many PR stakeholders are making the situation worse (including journalists.)

But here’s an idea anyway.

If the clash comes from blurring of individual identity/ correspondence and an institutional transaction, let’s simplify your incoming email to match.

All these suggestions shouldn’t require much more than a Gmail script and they all revolve around this: is there a story in this message or not?

1. Autohide greeting/ salutation

They spelled your name wrong: who cares. They left in a mail merge scripting line: who cares. When you do things many times, mistakes happen. It’s nothing to do with whether there’s a story or not – which is where your ire as a representative of your institution is relevant.

Bin it.

2. Autohide “I hope you’re well”

For reasons that should be clear.

3. Hide from/signature info

Does it matter if the message came from the biggest agency or the smallest? Again, it’s all about the story.

4. Automated “no thankyou” button

Sitting as close to hand as delete, you could press this button to send an automated response to one/ a group of messages saying “thanks for your message, unfortunately this isn’t one for me. My beat current covers X, Y, Z.” or similar.

This can be customised and will provide feedback to the people who send you stories, helping everyone from the best to the worst PRs out there equally. Without the journalist having to radically alter their habits.

Action time.

I’ve not been in this industry for the decades that most of these frustrations have. But it seems clear that better training and greater awareness of best practice will never fix the problems.

It’s time to use very basic, very simple, broadly available technology to reduce the friction. If we start with the recipient, the solution can scale against their many many senders faster than you may realise.