Product Reviews And PR Firms

And the PR firm brought down the tablet ...


One of the growing "threats" that corporate communicators need to tune in to is the blogging journalist.

When a mainstream reporter gets mad at you, he simply cusses you out and slams down the phone (or threatens to have you fired, as well-known Houston bully Marvin Zindler did to me one time ... "and no one in town will hire you," he said).

But a blogging journalist turns to the internets and slams you publicly.


Gettin' tough

Check out this angry rant by Jeremy Wagstaff (I'm not a tech PR guy so the name didn't ring a bell with me, but he writes for the Wall Street Journal online).

Jeremy wanted to review a Tablet PC and he was frustrated with the response he got from Microsoft's PR folks:

"Do these people not do any basic research? Do they have no idea what a journalist needs?"

Why would a reporter not get an immediate response when he/she wants to review a product? I'll tell you -- the client is stingy with them. And sometimes for good reason.

We once loaned an expensive phone/PDA combo to a journalist who refused to return it and who ran up big-time bills each month calling all over the world ... then he gave it to his wife who did the same.

We debated shutting off the service but thought that might cause him to get a tad angry. So it went on for a year before we finally got tough.


Answering to the client

Not saying that Jeremy would have kept the Tablet PC; I'm sure he wouldn't. But if you've ever worked at an agency, you can picture in your mind the questions that a client would expect you to ask before you turned over a product to a WSJ reporter.

So on this one, I'm not exactly siding with the PR firm, but ...

Here's another take from David Parmet's excellent blog, Marketing Begins at Home.

Update: Jeremy Wagstaff shares his thoughts on why he posted what he did here.

Technorati Tags: PR, Public Relations