I was just reading Ted Shelton’s rant about how he got a bunch of irrelevant spam from exhibitors at the Fall VON. Ted was bothered by the fact that he was receiving pre-show e-mail and phone calls from folks hawking stuff that don’t interest him. Ted cites the following pre-show problem points:

• The products aren’t related to your beat
• The request-for-interviews aren’t related to your beat
• Your email is stuffed with multimegabyte attachments from complete strangers
• The phone calls come at 5am

Now I don’t know if Ted was registered as press (I wasn’t) or if he just ranks near the top of the VoIPosphere (I don’t), but I didn’t get any of the same nuisance contacts he reported. I did get about five eVite notifications about a blogger party I went to as well as an invitation to a Boston Harbor dinner cruise that I didn’t end up attending.

Shelton offers a few ideas for how the situation can be improved, but it might be time for all of us to check out technologies like Iotum’s Relevance Engine, which (like many “2.0″ techs) empower the community, individually and collectively, to define the relevance communications like this, so that it’s up to us as to whether or not we’re bothered. Now I’m not reducing Relevance Engine to an opt-out list, though the comparison is obvious.

Considering how we need to empower OURSELVES as communicators in the community, I have to take slight issue with one of Ted’s suggestions:

Call the CEO or CMO of an abusing company. “You need to know your PR people are pissing off the press, making our jobs harder, and teaching us to ignore your announcements.” We don’t have the time for this, but maybe one call a week might quash ten thousand bad acts.

Look, the vast majority of marketing rank and file are, unfortunately, out of touch with the industry and with the community at large. Ted and I may be VoIP/Voice 2.0 lifers, but your typical marketing graduate is only going to be involved for a short time before moving into the lawn fertilizer market or the franchising industry or the hardware store retail market or something else.

There are, of course, very good, even visionary PR folks in our industry, but, like any other specialty, the thought leadership occurs in a minority of the industry populace, and the vast majority of other folks are just along for the ride.

Yet, with relevance-oriented technologies and interoperable communications systems, which breed individual user empowerment and indifference to proprietary ideas, the answer to the the PR spam problem (and many other spam problems), is staring us in the face today.