Strategic PR or PR spam?

I read a nice post by Veronica Belmont on how journalists treat press release spam.

From the agency side, I can testify to this being a problem that all agencies face as we counsel our clients. It's a symptom of a larger problem: a lack of strategic direction and understanding of the true business challenge that the communication program is trying to solve and how that plan unfolds over time. Sometimes this problem is on the agency side, sometimes on the company side (especially when PR Managers don't have a seat at the executive table).

Press release spammers are so focused on "getting coverage" (a short-term goal) that they've forgotten (or don't understand) the audience they are trying to reach. Reporters know who their audience is and they write for the people reading their publications.

But "spammers" don't seem to recognize that BusinessWeek's audience might not be the group they need to reach to drive a business forward, especially in an iterative way. Sure, every business would eventually like to be on the cover of BusinessWeek but they probably don't need to be to meet the current business goal.

Typically spammers are focused on generating any coverage they can to "get results" for their clients or internal stakeholders to justify their jobs. Often times it is a result of having a media list that is hundreds of names long that no one has taken the time to map back to actual target audiences for the company.

I would argue that if you have so many names on your media list that you can't personalize each mail, you haven't done enough strategic planning or you are trying to accomplish too much too fast. Proper strategic planning creates long-term communications efforts focused on gradual change in a target audience before migrating to other challenges. Being too narrowly-focused on a desire to get "quick hits" without any real understanding of what long-term change you are trying to affect leads to misguided efforts like Veronica describes.