Bank botches blogosphere break-in: NAB’s “spam-gate”
Today’s Crikey carries a story about the NAB (or rather a PR firm representing them, Cox&Inall) spamming Australian blogs with promotional comments. Rather than impotence treatments or naughty pictures, this spam (posted on sports blogs) was inviting blog readers to enter a promotion being run for the bank. The story is behind the Crikey paywall, but I reprint here a part of the story where they questioned someone from the PR agency about the strategy:
Cox+Inall had searched for blogs that included AFL coverage and were “well-enough read to attract readers who might be interested in our offer,” said Ms Glennie-Holmes. No-one at NAB or at Cox+Inall had considered approaching blog owners first for permission before posting their promotional messages, she said.
“Blogs are a public forum”, said Ms Glennie-Holmes. NAB and Cox+Inall felt this meant commercial interests could feel free to contribute unsolicited and irrelevant commercial material as comments, placing the onus on blog moderators to reject or delete unwanted comments.
“We identified five or six blogs where we felt we’d give it a try,” explained Ms Glennie-Holmes. “We chose blogs where we thought the moderators would review and decide whether or not to carry our message…it was up to the blogger to decide whether they would leave the comment there or delete it.”
I really don’t think that this is a good way forward for big business to engage with the blogosphere. Indeed, it betrays a pretty serious misjudgement on the part of Cox+Inall and their client’s about the nature of blogging and its rules of engagement. Claiming that blogs are a public forum is a major simplification of the relationship between bloggers, their regular readers and commenters and the wider world. It’s also disingenuous - they were really looking to get some free advertising at bloggers’ expense.
At minimum, some sort of consultation with the blogs’ authors/moderators in getting their promotion to their audience is in order when third-party commerical organisations want access to blogs. But of course, given the objections of some readers when bloggers decide to take ads, the need to tread carefully doesn’t end with having a word with the author.
NAB seems to have managed only to alienate the sympathies of people whose audience they clearly wish to reach. It seems that PR firms still have a lot to learn about the blogosphere’s ground-rules.
Blogs are no more a forum for free advertising than newspapers are, and perhaps less so, given that many bloggers operate under a particular theme or set of principles rather than auctioning advertising or reporting space off to the highest bidder. Would Cox+Inall run around the city sticking promotional material inside the front page of every newspaper and magazine on display in newsagencies and supermarkets, or would that be seen as a kind of piracy?
I doubt there would be a single blogger to disagree that the comments facilities are designed to allow readers to express opinions relating to the post. And I doubt there’s a single blogger who enjoys being spammed. Frankly, it pisses me off and if it was a well-known company like NAB that did it to me I’d probably be motivated to write a post badmouthing them for their tactics.