Facts and Figures

Irrelevant and untargeted PR releases are considerable sources of pollution and undermine the overall standing of the PR industry; so claims the introduction to a survey by An Inconvenient PR Truth, a movement that describes itself as "a passionate plea to the PR Industry to take action to tackle the issue of pollution caused by the sending of press releases to journalists, editors, bloggers and publishers for whom they are irrelevant." Behind the movement is RealWire (formerly Webitpr), a global news release distribution service specialising in online media. Conversations about PR spam are as old as PR itself, yet this new campaign claims that, despite the progress made by evolving social media tools, PR spam is currently now at a level which is deemed unacceptable by journalists, bloggers, editors and publishers. The survey, which was carried out between November and December 2009 found that the average number of press releases received each day was 54

Furthermore, 57 per cent of recipients suffer a level of irrelevent press releases of 80 per cent or more

But what about the content of this PR spam? The least popular story types are office openings, appointments and financial results, with product and market related stories the most popular.

Meanwhile, acceptable levels of irrelevant press releases vary significantly amongst Recipients, with almost as many considering 90 per cent as acceptable as zero per cent.

In other results, 33 per cent would prefer emails to be sent from named individuals, and 25 per cent would prefer to be addressed individually.
By focusing on the opinions of "recipients", the survey clearly emphasises the annoyance of spam; what it doesn't do is take into account the factors behind poor targeting of media, including issues such as client expectations and systems of measurement, a conversation that hopefully will emerge from this survey.
The full survey by An Inconvenient PR Truth can be downloaded at http://inconvenientprtruth.com/research/