I enjoy the way that Chris is the pot call­ing the ket­tle black. I get spammy crap from him con­stantly. Sure, he hides the other names he’s spam­ming his mes­sage to — but it’s still spam.

An apol­ogy from Brody PR — I cre­ated a list of social media experts who might be inter­ested in review­ing a new guide to social media for small biz. I inad­ver­tently put the list name in the cc: box, rather than the bcc: box. A few folks must have hit the “reply all” but­ton, rather than click­ing on the “unsub­scribe link” at the bot­tom, which started a stream of spam. Please accept my per­sonal apol­ogy, albeit a lit­tle late in the day, since I was try­ing to remove every­one who wanted to be unsub­scribed from the list immediately.

Are you kid­ding me? How has this issue got­ten so out of con­trol? I feel bad for you, Beth. Some peo­ple just love a skapegoat.

I do believe, “Nick,” that I started this post off with, “Don’t get me wrong, I receive — and send — so many of these email pitches as a blog­ger and the pres­i­dent of a dig­i­tal PR firm — and this was like any other,” so I sort of admit I am the pot call­ing the ket­tle black, indeed.

Thank you, I think that’s what every­one needed, more than any­thing else.

I don’t think the Cc or Bcc should be used at all for send­ing news to any­one. Send infor­ma­tion only to rel­e­vant peo­ple, make it per­sonal and a mass list isn’t nec­es­sary. Amirite?

Oh, please. Stop vil­i­fy­ing Beth Brody. She made a mis­take with the CC vs. BCC field. OK, I get that. It wasn’t inten­tional, obvi­ously, since Beth would know the ram­i­fi­ca­tions. That they are call­ing her press release “spam” is absurd. She’s just pro­mot­ing some book. She made up a mail­ing list, and sent the release. Come on, get real. That’s what delete key is for. This wasn’t a Niger­ian 419 get-rich mail­ing scam. No sales of Via­gra or Vailum or a master’s degree for $100. Plus no one is fault­ing the recip­i­ents who are mis­tak­enly hit­ting Reply All. And if auto-responders are doing this, fire the tech wiz­ard who set up your email servers. Auto-responders should go back to the sender only, NOT the CC list. It amazes me how peo­ple still have this prima donna atti­tude about get­ting pitched, and worse, how they think their email addresses are sacred. The pro­mot­ers offer­ing acai berries, Rolex watches and secu­rity alert logins for your bank accounts are the ones to be vil­i­fied. Instead, we go after Brody, the low-hanging fruit. Trash her busi­ness and spam her clients with hate mail. Wel­come to new media.

Beth you don’t seem to regret your method — copy­ing and past­ing blocks of email addresses — just your past­ing in one line vs another.

Some resources:

David Meer­man Scott’s ”New Rules of PR”
http://www.webinknow.com/2007/01/the_new_rules_o_...

Learn the social media secret hand­shake
http://blog.b2bcommunications.com/2009/06/30/lear...

You are right, Rayanne.

Just to be clear, the names of peo­ple on the email list were NEVER revealed unless they chose to reply all, in which case it was obvi­ous that they’d received the email (unless you’ve found some way to “hack” it?)

The email address of the mail­ing list itself was all that was revealed, and whilst it should have been (a) hid­den and (b) restricted, email addresses on the list weren’t com­pro­mised if no action was taken by any individual.

I’m not defend­ing the action, but believe me it’s very obvi­ous when some­one sends to every­one in the To: or Cc: fields — this wasn’t the case here.

Funny how Brody PR has done exactly what all the so-called A-listers and social media “experts” say they should do — cry “mea culpa!” and apol­o­gize — and yet are not get­ting any sort of “Good for them for apol­o­giz­ing” kind of mes­sag­ing. I guess it’s far eas­ier to be snarky and cackle over someone’s hon­est mis­take instead of being a decent human being and say­ing, “Good for you for cor­rect­ing the problem.”

Remind me who is call­ing the pot and ket­tle black again?

Dis­claimer: I work for Empower Media­Mar­ket­ing and this is my own opinion.

Hey Chris:

I think the real story was the obnox­ious behav­ior of every­one else on the list. While Beth Brody made a mis­take, every­one who hit Reply to All and wrote obnox­ious blog posts (which yours is not) con­sciously knew what they were doing. It was very rude and mean spir­ited. I don’t think many of these peo­ple would have done it to her face.

You are right that she had an oppor­tu­nity to stop the anger if she just came out pub­licly quickly to apol­o­gize which she did eventually.

Read my take on the whole case:

Social media “gurus” and blog­gers are ego­tis­ti­cal jerks
http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=915

Hi Chris,
Your blog and oth­ers inspired me to sum­ma­rize what I learned, http://brodypr.blogspot.com/
I hope oth­ers can learn from my mis­take.
Beth Brody

I have to admit. I was on the list and yes Beth made a mis­take how­ever, who are these A list blog­gers and jour­nal­ists that can’t fig­ure out not to hit reply-all? Any­one who knows how to write an email knows how to reply and reply all. And after the many peo­ple replying-all to other people’s pleas to stop reply­ing all it because a mess.

Sad that com­pa­nies such brody pr even play in this space. Strikes me as some­one in their kitchen, pc on top of PR for dum­mies books try­ing to fig­ure out how to email those who didn’t request it.

The bar is set way too low for PR firms. Most don’t have a clue.