By Linda Forrest
In honour of Halloween, this post is a round-up of the frightful ways that PR can scare away prospects and editors and how bad PR haunts those who neglect to adhere to best practices. Boo!
Frightfully bad PR practices
Last month, I wrote a whole post about bad publicity, but it’s worth scaring you silly again with the key points. At this very moment, there are PR practitioners who can’t write, can’t pitch, who are selling short your opportunity to tell your story, offering all strategy with no implementation or implementing a spray-and-pray program without any strategy to back it up. Frightening, isn’t it?
As a PR practitioner, nothing is scarier than reading about shoddy practitioners bilking clients with often significant fees, lessening, I might add, the esteem of our profession as a whole in the eyes of our future prospects. Reading stories about PR people harassing, disrespecting, bullying or otherwise giving people like us a bad name jeopardizes our ability to do our job. You sure don’t want to be the next PR person to call a reporter who has just had a bad experience with another practitioner; regardless of your approach, there’s a good chance your pitch will fall on deaf, if not disgruntled, ears.
There is no shortage of tech PR horror stories. TechCrunch is rife with them. From the headline from earlier this year, “Seriously, Timothy Johnson, Your Idea of How to do PR for Clients is a Joke,” which says it all, to “Anatomy of a PR Spin (aka How to Lie Like a Pro), this site proves that angering the side which has the attention of the marketplace’s ears and eyes is a dangerous game to play. Perhaps the most famous altercation between the PR industry and the technology media was Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s banning of a very long, very public list of PR practitioners who he accused (and probably rightly so) of sending useless and inappropriate emails his way. Huge amounts of digital ink were spilled in the debate back and forth as to whether his actions were warranted and appropriate, but as he later said, “I did this after years of abuse.” Everyone has their breaking point, and he had reached his.
How bad PR can haunt its perpetrators and victims
In my last post, I ended on the note that “while today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s bird-cage lining, things written online live forever.” Because of this fact, bad PR practitioners have nowhere to hide — inclusion on Chris Anderson’s list, for example, is irrevocable. Take for example, Gawker’s ongoing hate-on for Ronn Torossian. It’s safe to assume that Timothy Johnson will never place a story with TechCrunch again. Perhaps it’s time for a career change? If an individual has conducted themselves in a less than professional fashion, they have the option of turning their lives around, switching careers and trying to move on. But when a company commits a PR atrocity, it can be haunted for years to come. Example: when I say British Petroleum, what comes to mind?
There’s a whole cottage industry of websites devoted to outing companies that flub PR and practitioners who give PR a bad name. Scary stuff.
You need look no further than your nearest search engine if you want to read hair raising, terrifying tales of PR gone wrong.
Happy Halloween!
Image: TechTown
