For the last year and a half, I’ve been on the AdAge Power150 list of marketing blogs, which has been very exciting.
I’m at number 576 today (the Power150 is confusingly currently made up of 947 marketing blogs and growing daily). I used to rank much higher, but the list has doubled in size since I joined, so despite my Scores improving massively, my ranking does sound a bit rubbish.
I don’t really mind, except it appears that it’s easy to grab something called the OPML file (??? I’m not very technical) off the AdAge website and expand it into a list of names and email addresses.
Which seems to be what an awful lot of Online PR types have done. My inbox is full to bursting. I suppose it’s some kind of karmic payback for the year after graduating I spent as a PR Exec churning out press releases before I realised that Planning existed as a career option.
Today’s classic was this:
Quite why Tina Clough, SEO Manager at TopPosition thought I’d be interested in sales trends for sex toys I’m not quite sure. Or why her message was sent with High Importance. Then there’s my fellow (mostly American) Power150 bloggers, who send me regular upbeat updates on how wonderfully their marketing business is going and always end with some insight ‘on a personal note’.
I’m careful to make sure that my email address (sevensteps at tiscali dot co dot uk) is never available online as name@domain.com to prevent spiders from collecting it to bombard me with spam. I use a different address for commenting on other people’s blogs and that seems to stay spam free. But still the emails arrive.
I do honestly appreciate the heads-up I get from PRs when something cool is out there and its nice to feel connected. I could just do without quite so much thoughtless spamyness as well.
I think most spider can probably read abcd at hotmail dot com now.
Sadly.