I’m not sure if it is Cision specifically, but its gotta be one of these services.

I wonder, if they blast out an offer for an exclusive interview with all the bells and whistles, if you can hold them to it. It would be terribly poor publicity for their client, to put them on a no-name blog with no traffic whose target market will laugh at the interviewee, but they offered right? I’m tempted to pursue it just to force them to admit they blindly blasted. But then I wonder, how much are Cision et. al. making on my contact info?

The thing is, I have other more established blogs that would be a great fit. But if the firm is dumb enough to send an untargeted blast like that, I don’t know that I would want to offer that opportunity to them for fear of what they might do after the fact and how poorly they might handle that follow on publicity.

The blog they blasted this to will grow quickly once I focus on it and I’m tempted to write a post like yours and let it live on the blog so people see it down the road. Given who their client is, if I were the client I’d be mortified. I’m surprised I have not come across any articles about the fallout between clients and PR firms using these services when they realize the damage they are doing to their reps. And from what I’m reading in the comments above, it sounds like Cision and similar services are selling a random collection of email addresses as a much more filtered and targeted list than it apparently is. If I were the PR firm, I’d cancel my subscription and ask for a refund.

In any event, I thought getting that email was cool for about 10 minutes, but now I’m just left shaking my head in bewilderment.

One result is that I have trained my spam filters on a lot of legitimate businesses and educational and even governmental organizations, clients of Cision, because the spam has gotten out of control. So these people can’t contact me even if they had a legitimate reason to do so. I imagine others are training spam filters in this way too. Probably not good for Cision’s unwitting customers.

Lastly: I do not see how small-time bloggers have been conflated with journalists or media. Some might want this kind of “recognition,” but having a blog does not automatically make the blogger a journalist who should have to deal with this garbage, which can ruin all the fun of blogging.

Because here’s the thing — even if you did opt in to someone’s mailing list, you still retain the right to opt out when it no longer meets your needs. Well, the PR I’ve received through Cision is uniformly NOT targeted to our newspaper’s needs. But I can’t opt out. That’s not just wrong, it’s a bad business model.

If Cision made representations in writing that the list you were sold was opt-in, you may possess the smoking gun needed to expose these spammers and perhaps bring them to justice. If you’re willing to help, please contact me through my site, linked above. I’m a journalist for a leading Los Angeles radio station and guarantee as much anonymity as you desire. Thanks.

Very interesting topic. I think what the Shut-Up folks seem to miss is not your rights being impinged….Cision is selling bad email addresses. Their customers should be very upset. If I bought a list that was sold to me as Opt-In I expect it to be just that. Doesn’t that qualify their actions as fraud?

M

Unsolicited email may be forwarded to spam@uce.gov. I add “Cision” to to the subject to identify and help build the agency’s database.