First off, we’re again sending reporter’s names and email addresses in ProfNet Search queries as a temporary measure to ease the transition to the new system.  

At some point, we plan to replace the reporter’s email address with a “mail to” address that will direct member responses to the reporter’s ProfNet Inbox, while continuing to provide the reporter’s name in the query. But we’ll take this step only after we determine that the quality of the interaction is what we intended and that it satisfactorily meets the needs of both reporters and communications professionals. We must also communicate clearly to members why we’re taking this step and how it will work.

Here’s the simple fact with which we must collectively come to terms:

An increasing number of reporters fear that in distributing their email addresses to nearly 14,000 professional communicators they place themselves at higher risk of spam and unwelcome pitches. They’re telling us that they’re becoming leery of using ProfNet because they’re not prepared to deal with an avalanche of responses, off-target leads or other inappropriate uses of their queries or contact information.

If we’re to be confident that reporters will continue to turn to ProfNet for assistance on stories, we must stop improper forwarding of queries and give them a way to effectively manage responses. We believe they’ll find their ProfNet inbox to be a major upgrade because it will enable them to:

• browse and acknowledge all responses on a single Web page
• signal to members when they’re no longer in need of responses
• block delivery of queries to members who send what they consider to be inappropriate responses
• resend queries for which they need more leads