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Publicis Mojo accidental Spammer for Metamucil

By Nick Hodge | December 10, 2008

Update, 3:20pm

Just off the phone to the Pub­li­cis. There are two issues here: one is the broken con­fig­ur­a­tion of @pm.ad as the reply-to email address. A mis­con­fig­ur­a­tion error.

Thanks to Pub­li­cis for reach­ing out and being hon­est; and start­ing to resolve the issue.

From earlier today:

  1. Poten­tial source of the “fol­low”: I men­tion metamu­cil on twit­ter. No occur­rences of this word on my blog until this par­tic­u­lar post­ing. and oth­ers such have found the same issue with unso­li­cited email from the same sender, with sim­ilar contents.
  2. Up until this point, I have been a happy and reg­u­lar user of said fibre sup­ple­ment brand below. Note that this brand is owned by Proc­tor and Gamble. I am not going to link out to said product.
  3. The per­son that received this email is men­tioned 5 times on my web site, and there is at least one link from my site to theirs (note: I have “xx”’d the name out below)
  4. The owner and pub­lisher of this web site, Nick Hodge, in no way, expli­citly nor impli­citly gave per­mis­sion for any brand: includ­ing Microsoft, to use to my blog as “trus­ted ref­er­ence sell” nor source of email addresses. Read­ing Microsoft’s policy on Online Pri­vacy, I am pretty sure that doing this style of “email har­vest and ref­er­ence social mar­ket­ing” is highly wrong, and con­tra­ven­tion of this policy is a ser­i­ous offence.
  5. “Unso­li­cited email” is spam. Plain and simple.
  6. The con­tent on my site is (cc) Attribution-Non-commerical Share-Australia 2.1, as per the link at the bot­tom of each page. I con­sider this spam­ming is a breach of my Terms and Conditions.
  7. Sub­sequently, I am very unhappy with Pub­li­cis Mojo. You do not get social media, you are a spam­mer. Of the worst kind.
  8. I am recom­mend­ing the receiver of this email report both Proc­tor and Gamble, and Pub­li­cis Mojo as a Spam­mer as per the Spam Act (2003) and amendments
  9. It seems that the domain name “pm.ad” might exist, how­ever fur­ther research by an white-hat secur­ity expert:
    • *.ad is a top-level domain owned by Andorra, the country
    • pm.ad would be a logical place for ‘pub­li­cis­mojo an advert­ising agency’ to register; or may be used for internal sites
    • if you send email to ‘postie@publicismojo.com.au’ the bounce back is from the same mail.publicismojo.com.au IP address as in the below spam example: 134.159.132.130
    • 130.159.132.130 is Pub­li­cis Mojo in Aus­tralia (as per apnic)
    • rob­tex has some inter­est­ing details on this domain range
From: Blog Seeding <BloggerRelations@pm.ad>
Date: 2008/12/9
Subject: For xx
To: xx@xx.xx.au

Hi xx,

Sorry for the unsolicited email.

I was reading your blog and noticed you're particularly influential in the blogosphere.
I even saw your blog reposted on NickHodge.com.

I'm working on behalf of Metamucil on their new Fibresure product and
I was wondering if you would be receptive to us sending you a xmas gift pack?
No obligations, of course! :) 

Look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Publicis Mojo

Topics: socialmedia, socialnetworking, technology | 15 Comments »

15 Responses to “Publicis Mojo accidental Spammer for Metamucil”

  1. Ewen Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 11:31 am

    Wouldn’t that give you the sh… sorry. couldn’t resist.

    If you’re in Aus­tralia you can report spam to the ACMA — http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310294

    I have repor­ted to them in the past and they have addressed my com­plaints every time.

  2. Ellery Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Yeh, say­ing “sorry for the spam” doesn’t change the fact that you’re spam­ming people. And surely Pub­li­cis Mojo real­ised hav­ing the sender’s name appear as “Blog Seed­ing” in an email instead of an actual real human’s name would make blog­gers go “WTF, spammer?”.

    I’d be inter­ested to see whats in the gift pack for said ‘fibre products’. Hodge… since you’re ‘par­tic­u­larly influ­en­tial in the blo­go­sphere’, can you get me one? I could use some metamu­cil branded beach tow­els. And some sweet smelling orange col­oured soaps for the toi­let maybe good? :)

  3. Dixie Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 2:33 pm

    Hello Nick,
    This is not spam but simply a mix up with our IT dept (the email account was set up incor­rectly). We are send­ing out Metamu­cil Fibre­sure Xmas gift packs to a few key blog­gers so they can try it for them­selves. We men­tioned your blog in our mes­sage because you are well regarded in the blogosphere.

    Sorry for the mix-up, the email address is fully func­tion­ing now. If you are inter­ested, let us know and we will send you an Xmas pack too.

    Cheers.
    Dixie
    Pro­du­cer — Pub­li­cis Digital

  4. Ewen Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

    I am really curi­ous to hear an explan­a­tion of how you “acci­dent­ally” send spam in this man­ner. Spam is spam, no mat­ter what spin you put on it.

  5. Nick Hodge Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    Dixie

    The ‘spam’ part is get­ting unso­li­cited email.

    The mis-use part is not abid­ing by the license clearly stated on my site; and not seek­ing per­mis­sion to ‘ref­er­ence’ sell a product based on my endorsement.

    Also, the email sent out made it seem like I endorsed the product: and this was done without my per­mis­sion. The recip­i­ents actu­ally thought I had given you their email address: sort of like net­work selling. A concept I totally abhor.

    Finally, there was no human/contact details at your end to call/email/fax … to talk to. ANY com­pany want­ing to do “social” stuff needs to real­ise it is about real humans. Not call centres, blank emails etc. etc.

    I class this as fail. Epic Fail.

    On the Metamu­cil side: I own enough for the moment, and would prefer to remain aloof from endorsement.

    Nick

  6. Stephen Collins Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 3:16 pm

    I got the same smap. Ignored it mostly.

    Inter­est­ingly, you weren’t the “trus­ted ref­er­ence”, which in my case was Gavin Heaton (servantofchaos).

    I was temp­ted to note this as another fail­ure of social media and mar­ket­ing in Aus­tralia, but I figured I’d been enough of a cur­mudgeon this year.

    It’s good to see PM are on to fix­ing this, but even if the cam­paign had been not spammy, I find it offens­ive and annoy­ing to be con­tac­ted by a brand/agency and not a human within them.

  7. Stephen Collins Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 3:17 pm

    Hee­hee.

    Spelling fail. smap=spam…

  8. Mick Liubinskas Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    Oh, I thought I was the influ­en­tial blog­ger that got it.

    Dang.

    Oh, well. I think the play of metamu­cil giv­ing people the $hits is pretty funny.

    But it is a clear dis­play of fail­ure of a PR 1.0 com­pany to get 2.0. It was close, but nope.

    They found me on twit­ter, so an @ mes­sage would have been nice.

    But the biggest fail­ure is not being human. You can’t con­nect to another human from Mojo Pub­li­cis. You have to do it human to human.

    If in doubt, ask one per­son in the space first. Pay them if you have to, but we’re a nice bunch and will point you in the right direction.

    Nice job Nick.

  9. Laurel Papworth Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 3:29 pm

    Heh. This was my response to their email, sent yesterday:

    “Send the email to me again, as a real per­son and I’ll send you my details. But if you are a spam­mer, go away! o.O ”

    I’m always up for free stuff. :P

    I was par­tic­u­larly amused that there was no real per­son behind “Blog­ger Rela­tions”. No human beings in the con­ver­sa­tion. Well except me and that’s debate­able. :P *sighs* Social media can be so lonely :)

  10. Dixie Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 5:08 pm

    Hello again every­one.
    Thanks for all your feed­back and patience. We genu­inely desire to do right by the blo­go­sphere and want to be com­pletely trans­par­ent on what we are try­ing to do.

    We researched the Aus­tralian blo­go­sphere, find­ing 25 blog­gers who we believed would be inter­ested in a Fibre­sure xmas gift pack con­tain­ing a product sample and a few other goodies.

    Using a gen­eral email account (to share between a few people), we emailed the blog­gers about the gift packs. Unfor­tu­nately, the email account was set up incor­rectly (which would have appeared pretty odd to the recip­i­ents) and we neg­lected to include any per­son­al­iz­a­tion in the mes­sage. A couple quick les­sons learned (bet­ter QA, more per­son­al­iz­a­tion) over here!

    Thanks for the oppor­tun­ity to explain ourselves. I hope you can see we are not try­ing to be sub­vers­ive or spam any­one as it might have appeared. If any­one has any ques­tions on this, please con­tract me directly.

    Thanks.
    Dixie
    Pro­du­cer – Pub­li­cis Digital
    02 9258 9367
    BloggerRelations@publicisdigital.com

  11. Mick Liubinskas Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Thanks Dixie. That’s a pretty good comeback. (except the brand name drop, but not too bad).

    Screw­ing up, admit­ting it and then really mak­ing amends is one of the best way to wow people and ‘live the flow’ and you’re on your way.

    Put­ting your phone num­ber in is also good, if you mean it. Bet­ter if you use dixie@publicisdigital.com though oth­er­wise we’re still think­ing it’s a catchall, which it might be but you can make me feel bet­ter about it.

    “Com­munit­ies, the tem­pera­mental mis­tress. Caring and sup­port­ing, but ruth­less in a flash.”

  12. Stephen Collins Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 5:56 pm

    Dixie, as much as I’m not a user of the product you’re work­ing with, you’ve won some points by being really open here. Big props to you for that.

    Mick’s right, we’d prefer to talk to *you* and who­ever else is on the team at your per­sonal addresses.

    Your bus­ted email explan­a­tion sounds kind of iffy, but I think we’re all keen to give you the bene­fit of the doubt based on your openness.

    Like Laurel, I’m always up for a free­bie ;)

    More import­antly, I’m now inter­ested enough in this cam­paign to talk about you on my blog (tonight some time) based on your responses here.

  13. Examples of Social Media Damage Control » Skribe Productions Says:
    December 12th, 2008 at 6:25 pm

    […] on real life situ­ations. The details of the first one (the email that went wrong) can be found here and the second one (cor­por­ate thug or con­sumer pro­tector) can be found […]

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    December 13th, 2008 at 6:22 am

    […] in P-aaaaargh! … but if I had the time, I would have writ­ten some­thing like this or maybe some­thing along these lines. No Com­ments Leave a Com­ment­track­back address­There was an error with your com­ment, please try […]

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    December 23rd, 2008 at 8:30 am

    […] email from Pub­li­cis Mojo rep­res­ent­ing Metamu­cil in an attempt to engage the blog­ging com­munity. Nick Hodge covered it nicely here since a num­ber of us blo­gos­nobs received the […]

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