Yesterday I opened up my email and there was a message to a list called “DigitalBrand” from a PR agency pitching a book. It was bulk email to a list of people, I have no idea how many but as the events unfolded in the morning I recognized many of the people on the list, mostly journalists, authors, public speakers, and other influential bloggers (note that I am in none of the above categories… so I was kind of honored to be included!).

The list name was in the CC, meaning anyone who replied to the email ended up re-spamming the entire list, by the end of the day over 50 messages were traded, not a lot considering but I think that by late morning they had shut down the list server to control the traffic.

Lesson #1: Don’t use lists but if you must then think ahead and put the list in the bcc field. PR pitches should be personal in this day and age, spamming a list isn’t going to make you any friends.

Throughout the morning people, also on the list, were replying back questioning how they got on the list, demanding to be taken off, and sundry other harshly worded messages. I have no idea how I ended up on this mailing list, but a quick search revealed I had nothing from them previously (I only delete outright spam from my inbox, which explains why I have 50k messages in my Gmail account.

Lesson #2: Don’t pitch or promote a service or product to an email list consisting of people who didn’t ask to be on the list. Pissing off the people you are trying to court is not smart.

Despite many pleas from people to take them off the list, demanding to know why they were on it, and expressing dismay that it was happening in the first place, no one from the offending agency stepped in to offer an explanation of what happened, why, and what they were doing to fix it. Later came torrent of emails from the list server with unsubscribe help ticket confirmations, it felt a virtual black hole sucking in everyone on the original list.

Lesson #3: Being engaged may seem so 2008 but it still matters. If you are pitching something about social media, make a blatant mistake, and then don’t step up to explain yourself, you have not only pissed off a lot of people but you throw away any sympathy and “don’t worry about it” sentiment that certainly exists. We have all made mistakes with email, and will certainly make mistakes in the future…

The final observation is that because their is no latency in communication today, individual acts like sending an mail to a list and setting off a cascading series of unfortunate events, can happen with blinding speed and far greater amplitude than anyone expects. By the afternoon the Twitterverse was picking up on this incident and blog posts were appearing, none of it complimentary and certainly not beneficial to this firm’s clients.

People who communicate for a living and to groups not connected to their firm need to be very careful about these small acts that can quickly spiral out of control. I deliberately didn’t include the name of the firm, although no doubt you will quickly figure it out if you follow the links, because I don’t think they deserve to be burned in effigy… it was a mistake and I’m sure more than a few people had a very bad day today.

Having said that, I can’t help but notice that this event underscores the idea that people who are used to being pitched for a living don’t want to be pitched like they used to. In this unfortunate incident are some real lessons to be learned about how PR firms deal with the people they want to court support from.