When PR ‘practitioners’ don’t recognise the difference between the old and the new ways of marketing and then fail to change their strategy, the result is this. (The most frightening part about the list is that this is merely the tip of an iceberg of ill-judged press releases.)
That’s a big ‘ouch’ if your name or your PR firm’s name is listed here. A search in Google UK for the first company listed has ‘Idiot PR people’ as the fifth result. That’s probably not the PR this PR firm were looking for. And this won’t go away.
How could these PR firms have avoided this? It’s simple: if you’re going to pitch bloggers, read their blogs and find out what they’re interested in. Irrelevant press releases and unsolicited information about topics of no interest is nothing less than spam.
Old world PR firms are used to using their contact list as a way of convincing clients that their news is reaching a wide audience. That doesn’t cut it when it comes to blogs or any of the new technologies used for on-line discussion and recommendations.
These listed PR firms can still turn things around, though. An apology, a promise to change their strategy, and a grateful awareness that they’ve learned a valuable lesson could make their brand less toxic. Nothing works so well as a well-timed humble acknowledgement of mistakes made.
