Stop Going to the Well, You Idiots.

I got an email this morning from someone affiliated with the same cause Ann Fisher wrote up in Today's Dispatch: A group trying to protect folks from campaign calls, particularly robo-calls.

Not an unsympathetic cause, but I'm not going to be helping out with that, for a rather ironic reason. Somebody else has pretty much ruined it for them.

I posted several days ago about getting "cause spam" asking me to highlight a campaign against clusterbombs. I did a minimal amount of research, fell for the pitch and posted. Since then, I've gotten the same email plea, practically cut-and-pasted, from a different advocacy group. This afternoon I got an e-mail asking me to embed a poll about "Sara Palin" (sic).

As you may guess, just like the recipients of multiple campaign calls, I've gone from friendly to ticked off. How do I know that this afternoon's mail is from the same people as the two cut-and-paste campaigns? I have already mentioned that I get these solicitations from multiple sources. Well, I know because the weird Palin poll is sponsored by an online PR company who touts their success with the clusterbomb group on their webpage. Blue Bexley is one of the "122 earned media mentions."

That company? Abraham & Harrison.

If you're thinking of hiring Abraham and Harrison, you should be aware that one successful campaign is a whole lot easier than getting bloggers to repeatedly flog for free the stories you're paid to get out. We, meaning I, don't like it one bit. When that happens, bloggers will post every permutation of your name that they can think of, like Abraham/Harrison, Abraham Harrison LLC, ahpoll.com, etc. to make sure that your intended audience has an easy time determining whether what they're reading is propaganda.

You'll then have to hire a company like Abraham & Harison, or even Abraham & Harisson or Abraham and Harrisson to clean up your search engine results.

Of course, if they could really do that, you wouldn't be here now, would you?