Blogs and PR
Although the multicultural ad industry sometimes drags its feet getting into the digital age, the PR industry doesn’t seem to have that problem. Very early on, PR agencies and their clients realized the power of the Internet and of blogs in particular. The trouble that Wal-Mart and Edelman got into back in 2006 is a testament to this.
At ThinkMulticultural, we get outreach from time to time from PR agencies for companies like Wal-Mart and AT&T who want us to feature what great things their clients are doing in multicultural markets. This is done in hopes that something we write about those clients will reflect well upon them. That’s perfectly legitimate. Sometimes it is even interesting and we write about those things.
But there’s a downside to blog-outreach, and that’s the spam comment. Comments appear when someone writes in response to a post and it then appears below the post (see the “Submit Comment” box at the bottom of the page?). In contrast to real comments, spam comments are designed to look like real comments, but really are just links back to some other website, used to drive traffic and increase search rankings on Google.
We got a spam comment last week from a major multicultural media company. We were really surprised, because normally spam comments come from people selling Viagara and fake Rolex watches, not from large, legitimate companies.
We’re not going to name names this time, but you know who you are. And we know who you are. Do us all a favor - use legitimate PR and advertising. If you’re doing something interesting, we’ll write about it. Don’t drag down the conversation with cheap tricks like that.