Candidate Spin Spam

Public Relations Spam from Candidates Most of the e-mail messages I get from campaign flaks and other public relations types automatically tag and sort into my “PR Spam” folder. The last couple of days have been especially heavy, with 43 messages through early this morning. The lion’s share have been from the Romney and McCain campaigns.

Every time I write about the topic, such as my “Netiquette” piece for the Politico with Jeff Mascott, or talk to public relations professionals in the government or business sectors, I’m always told how obvious my advice to target and limit one’s message is.

And yet they continue to send dozens of messages a day. Do they really think this is the most effective way to get people on their side?

FILED UNDER: 2008 Election, Blogosphere,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Michael says:

    Large images like that really screw with the page formatting. Have whomever is maintaining the site’s design add a “clear: both” style attribute to an element after the article, that should fix it.

    http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_classification.asp

  2. FireWolf says:

    Hell James, if it works for spammers why not campaign activists?

    😉

  3. James Joyner says:

    Large images like that really screw with the page formatting.

    What are you seeing? In both Firefox and IE, it’s displaying fine for me. I keep image sizes under 600 pixels so that they don’t expand the middle column; this one’s 427.

    Usually, I specify an image size by a width= command but it doesn’t work well for text-intensive images, so I just cropped it.

  4. James,

    I think Michael is referring to the fact that the image extends down into the next post.

  5. James Joyner says:

    I think Michael is referring to the fact that the image extends down into the next post.

    Thanks. Oddly, it doesn’t on my screen and I use fairly large resolution. But, apparently, with very large resolution, it does.

    Michael suggested a fix offline that I’m having Ed look into.