So this morning a pretty standard email pitch came into my inbox. It wasn’t my cup of tea, so I ignored it. But then someone responded to it, and I saw that response. Uh, oh, I knew immediately where this was going. Sure enough, minutes later dozens of others were responding, most saying something along the lines of “take me off of this list” — of course, whether they realize it or not, they were sending that very message to everyone on the list.
Some followed up trying to apologize on behalf of the whole PR industry for this fiasco. Others threatened to out people who kept responding to the thread in national magazines. Then things got even uglier, “Take me off this fucking list which I never asked to be on and cannot unsubscribe from,” said one lucky subscriber. The fact that every single one of these replies was going to everyone on the list was very annoying, but ultimately forgivable. What’s not forgivable is when the automated help desk tickets started sending massive amounts of emails to everyone on the list.
It looks like some SEO site submitted a help request ticket to get them off of the list, and from that point on, everyone who responded showed up as the same SEO site emailer talking about this random troubleshooting ticket. It started getting really ridiculous. As Justin Smith of InsideFacebook notes on one of my status’ “this is getting pretty incredible. 13 emails in the last 10 minutes.” And Caroline McCarthy of CNET just Rickrolled me on Twitter, saying she had a way to get us off of the list. This is getting out of control.
So really nice job, Brody PR. Not only does practically everyone in the blogosphere and print media world now hate you, but you’ve ensured that whatever it was you were trying to pitch (some book on social media marketing) will never get any coverage. PR FAIL.
I’m sure I’ve read this before.
Those SEOs are so nasty sometimes.
http://proprtips.com/
ouch!
Please post the distribution list, so that I can send a press release to them all, regarding a mail filter product.
(kidding)
Lois?
LMAO!!
Seriously, dude, if you’d just watch the video to the end with the volume turned up all the way it would tell you how to unsubscribe.
[Agreed on the PR-fail front though. WTF.]
Please unsubscribe me from this comment thread.
You’re subscribed to early 90s haircuts
You’re following an old joke on Twitter
This is actually one of the better recent TC comment threads.
This happened to me a few years ago, when a local health club got hold of a _huge_ and mostly illegal (people on the preferential) list and sent out some offer.
However, they made a total balls up of the mail out, just like these guys.
But it got worse. Much worse.
Due to a bug in the Windows mail server software, each reply generated another new mail out, which also (somehow) grabbed all of the replies to that email and sent them back out, too.
This whole thing grew exponentially until the entire British Telecom hub for Sheffield collapsed.
Amazing.
Also amazingly stupid.
Plain irritating when this happens internally but when its from some overconfident PR firm that noone ever really wanted to hear from in the first place.. well.. this happens.
*waits for the 1 guy defending PR on the last TC article involving PR to turn up and personally insult him yet again*
Reminds me of the college listserv
No way man. Stuff on the college listserv was EPIC! At least at my college….like the time a classmate was e-mailing me instructions on making a bong with the subject “For tonight” and accidentally sent it to the listserv instead….which of course I then had to hit Reply All to say “Um, I don’t know who this person is or why he’s implying that I’m in some way interested in illegal activities…” and of course, he wasn’t about to let slight slide without a fight…and well…yeah, good times, good times.
It’s not a complete fail. There’s always traditional media =).
It’s so funny how many people are subscribed to email lists but really have no understanding of how they work.
Talk about adding insult to injury, MG got rickrolled in the process. Funny
This happened to me with a group of people I didn’t really know that well. A friend of a friend sent out an email to a huge group of people, including me, and they all ended up using the “reply all” option. I ended up getting spammed by these people for weeks. I didn’t want to block anyone in case they wanted to genuinely contact me at some point. I wasn’t the only one annoyed, but of course the annoyed replies ended up being replied to all too x_x
Why is it so hard to just hit the delete button! I can understand getting hot under the collar if you get a lot of spam from the same person multiple times. But otherwise just let it go.
It was spam from the same people multiple times. It went on for weeks and it wasn’t just one or 2 emails a day, it was usually between 10 and 20.
On the other hand – the PR company successfully got an article written about the release.
Fail, or EPIC WIN?
(still fail)
If only Gmail had a built-in feature to ignore conversations like this. Oh wait, they do… it’s called mute.
I’m always surprised that some Gmail users don’t know about the “mute” ability. Just use the ‘m’ key and as long as it’s a mailing list (not to you specifically), you won’t see that conversation show up in your inbox again.
Well, I didn’t know about it until I read some “poweruser” guide.. they should advertise it more, it’s very useful for stopping the inanity
I think a lot of people don’t know gmail has shortcuts. If it’s not made blatantly obvious people just won’t know about them because few people will think to look it up.
I’m not sure I quite understand why this is a PR fail – companies pitch products all the time. What does seem like a total fail however, is the platform the email list itself is running on. A simple help request ticket getting forwarded to the *entire* list and then all responses getting forwarded to the list? That’s the main problem here…well that in addition to pinheads who aren’t intelligent enough to not hit “reply all” to everything they see.
The issue here is that the holier than thou reporters at TechCrunch love picking on the pr industry. What is so so so so funny is when they need a pr person. Phone call after email after phone call on how utterly important it is to get their story published. They make people jump through hoops. But GOD FORDIB someone make a mistake. As if people at TC never report stuff the wrong way after a PR person has practically written the article for them.
Get over yourselves TC and start focusing on reporting news. Not bashing someone for making a simple mistake.
Hilarious! This exact thing happened in the music blogger community yesterday… except it turned into a very friendly and fun banter between dozens of global music bloggers. We’ve since started a private music blogger community as a result of #replyall and #musicbloggerday. A PR blunder turned into a huge online networking event!
Maybe somebody doesn’t know how to use the Cc: and Bcc: fields, and top-posts relentlessly. Gmail users fall into these categories. Gmail is fine for spammers, beginners, and top-posters, but not for adults.
I wonder how much longer it took to write this blog post than it would take to delete every email MG ever would have received from this PR agency.
Hardly worth writing about. Hardly worth commenting about. In fact, I’m completely ashamed that I am pressing the “Add Comment” button in 3-2-1…
This happened in a British IT company I used to work for about ten years ago. Some guy sent one email to the wrong internal dist list and sent to global – all 20K+ employees. Of course, hundreds of supposedly highly educated people started a horrible email snowball which lasted what seemed hours. Towards the end of the torrent, HR got involved and threatened to sack any further emailers. By which time a thread of nonsense emails had started to develop, and which continued well past the HR sacking threats. Often wondered whether they carried through on the threat. People are stoopid!
haha.. i was a victim of this as well. I wanted to kill everyone in my inbox this morning.
I think their website was made in Front Page, though they removed the meta data so I can’t be too sure.
I was on this list too, i deleted all earlier emails but they still kept coming in so I had to reply all because I had no clue about where it originated from
The worst that ever happened to me was maybe 15 years ago when some folks associated with the ACM sent out what was essentially a spam message advertising an upcoming conference to a list with a large number of people on it, INCLUDING the list address itself, creating a really nasty loop. I got tens or hundreds of copies of the same message before they fixed the thing after an hour or so. (It annoyed me so much that I still remember it.)
Pure awesome on a scale of 1 to FAIL
Gmail has filtering or rules like outlook right? I’d just set one of those up. I’m honestly just asuming they do. I have a real email server (exchange) so I’m not sure exactly what features gmail has.
Gmail has one-key filtering of threads: just press the ‘m’ key to mute that conversation.
awesome, this is too funny ;D although laughing at this will probably send bad karma my way and I’ll end up making the same dumbass mistake…now i’ll probably have nightmares about it.
You’re doing it wrong part 349:
Here’s the apology she left on some other blogs:
“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.”
If I thought it would work, I’d Reply All to the Raymond Aaron spam I keep getting. But these guys look a LOT more responsive than the RA people.
Haha, I got this too! So annoying! Wait, no I didn’t, I just want to sound important….
After some comments like, “Why didn’t you just hit the Mute key”, I checked it out and it appears if the list name is in the cc: box, the mute on gmail won’t stop messages from getting to your inbox.
Your story doesn’t even make sense. After two paragraphs I still don’t understand what you’re talking about.
Explanation fail.
The PR person made a novice mistake, but the people responding with venom and threats are bullies and babies. Must be nice to have a life where the worst thing that happens to you is you get some silly reply-all email.
Nice and normal humans who make human mistakes, I’ll happily work with -they’ll learn and grow. The vicious meanies I think many of us could do without. As Rafe said, they need to chill.
I hope others can learn from my mistake. Quite a few people gave me valuable advice this week and I have summarized it here, http://brodypr.blogspot.com/
Beth Brody
People stupidity is hardly a news. After few messages like this I usually add a filter to my email client to filer all messages with this subject direct to trash and forget about it.