First Bite PR reveals it's been reading my blog and is desperate to make amends for its past bad behaviour. Now Nick Giles of Text 100 has rung up to say he's launching an internal investigation into what's been going wrong at Text 100. I feel almost mean for mentioning it now: their IBM team has actually been pretty good, even if Novell has missed out on some free (good) publicity thrown in their direction by me.
I don't feel that mean, though. One thing I've noticed over the years is that, ironically, journalists don't get a right to reply. If a journalist writes something in an article and you disagree with it, you can write a letter to the magazine in question. Nine times out of ten, the editor won't print a defence or even ask for the journo's defence; they'll just run the letter, grateful that someone's written in. The letter will hang there, uncountered, like a Blunkett accusation of intrusion into private life, and people will assume that “bloody journalists” have got it wrong again.
PRs and marketing people write to mags all the time (standing PR tactic 47 to counter bad publicity), saying articles are inaccurate, “bad journalism”, etc. And that used to be that. This is the first time in history that the common or garden journalist can publish their own defence. God bless the blog.
Now I have this new-fangled “power”, though, maybe I should aim higher than just whinging about PRs who can't answer phones or set up interviews: not only has that been done to death, I'm sure there's something better I can do than shine light on mild inefficiency at PR companies.
Still, look what it's achieved. Of the top three bad PR companies I nominated, two are pulling their socks up. I haven't felt this good about sticking up for my consumer rights since I scared some noisy kids out of The Bourne Supremacy. That leaves one slacker. I'm counting the days until The Red Consultancy rings. Shall we agree that we'll use that figure as a metric for how good they are as a PR company? Seems perfectly fair to me.
The clock's ticking.
Technorati Tags: Bite PR, PRs, tech journalism
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