PR Writing Rant and Using the CAN-SPAM Act to Get Off Mailing Lists
Hype never helps if you can’t honestly highlight the handouts — or pay attention to requests.
Image credit: Unsplash user Kyle Glenn
Sometimes You Should Throw Away All the Adjectives
I just received a press release that in about 250 words cycled through the following cliches: enter xyz [as a solution]; shake up [an industry]; trailblazing; disrupting the status quo; revolutionary; groundbreaking work; CEO with an impressive background and recognized thought leader who is an idea candidate.
So, close to 20% of the content. Whew.
What particularly struck me was that there seemed to be interesting claims about an industrial process that, while not something I might write about at the moment, touched on things I had covered and also seemed potentially cool, in a technical sense.
The vague and drab wording missed the following:
If supposedly environmentally safe technology, how so?
There’s a comparison to an existing standard industrial technology, but the PR person (and presumably the client as well) didn’t consider that perhaps a few nuggets putting this into factual perspective would be useful.
Is there really no one else doing this? A point to an existing market or even research (maybe from a university) pointing to the efficacy could help dispel the handwaving.
The release mentions recycling a certain type of product. There are other products that might also seem a logical target. Are they?
The CEO’s expertise is apparently in founding, financing, and advising young companies. Is the person really the expert to talk about the technology beyond simple bullet points? Should the release be trying to raise the company’s profile and capabilities (in which case a chief technology officer or scientist with the correct expertise might be best), or the CEO’s? Those should be two separate endeavors to keep focus.
Overall, PR, like other areas of market, can be successful when targeting the interests of the customer with the benefits they might receive. For a release, there can be multiple audiences. A reporter or editor wants enough information to decide if there is something real being offered, if it’s news, and if it would be of interest to the readers.
That might argue for using multiple versions of a release, like one sent to journalists and another to house on a company’s website for customers to see. But in any case, cutting the spurious stuff and focusing on something meaningful is still a better path to success. If you can’t, maybe it’s not time for promotion.
Image credit: Unsplash user Hannes Johnson
Using the CAN-SPAM Act to Get Companies to Stop Emailing You
A second irritant, to me at least, of PR is when that minority of firms won’t stop following up even if you request it and won’t take you off a mailing list.
The CAN-SPAM Act is, as the Federal Trade Commission explains, “a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.”
All commercial messages — “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” according to the law — comes under this, not just bulk mail.
The following points on the government site are valuable (each a direct quote):
Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.
And here are the details on penalties (again from the site):
“Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $50,120, and more than one person may be held responsible for violations. For example, both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that originated the message may be legally responsible. Email that makes misleading claims about products or services also may be subject to laws outlawing deceptive advertising, like Section 5 of the FTC Act. The CAN-SPAM Act has certain aggravated violations that may give rise to additional fines. The law provides for criminal penalties – including imprisonment – for:
accessing someone else’s computer to send spam without permission,
using false information to register for multiple email accounts or domain names,
relaying or retransmitting multiple spam messages through a computer to mislead others about the origin of the message,
harvesting email addresses or generating them through a dictionary attack (the practice of sending email to addresses made up of random letters and numbers in the hope of reaching valid ones), and
taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without permission.”
The next time some PR firm won’t listen, consider your options. I’ve found that by pointing this out (after a number of requests or messages that don’t offer the opt out option, people remove my email address readily for the most part.
In emailed ads (spam), there also ought to be an easily-spottable and honestly-named unsubscribe link. I called a company on this last week when they placed the unsubscribe link somewhere near the top of the email. That's not where we've all come to expect it. It should be near the bottom; it should NOT be light gray on a white background or some other color scheme that prevents easy detection; and it should say UNSUBSCRIBE instead of some annoying vagueness like "manage your email preferences." Finally, what FOLLOWS clicking on the unsubscribe link should be simple and straightforward as well. Don't give me a box to enter my email address, you already have it. Don't give me a list of certain types of company spam that I DO want to subscribe to.,' cause I clearly don't. And please don't ask me why I want to unsubscribe (none of your business, but it's likely because you're fucking pests), or whether I'm sure.
Companies that don't follow these practices can count on my profound enmity. I will not give their products any play, I won't reach out to them if I need a source, I will not buy anything from them, and I will in fact discourage others from doing business with them every chance I get.
In other words, if you treat my inbox like you're entitled to it and to my attention, you'll likely regret it.
To end on a positive note, let's take a moment to thank the programmers who work on spam filters. Remember how horrible spam was 20 years ago? How your inbox was constantly polluted by assholes of all stripes? 99 percent of that grossness and tripe is now reliably filtered out. That's huge.