Sunday, March 16th, 2008 - 3:55PM
I’ve been meaning to pose this question for a while, here’s the setup: HP, like most companies, pre-briefs members of the press on upcoming announcements. Naturally this is all under embargo / NDA / pinky-swear — so even discussing this stuff unlikely to win me any brownie points, but oh well — and the last time I was briefed, my media contacts requested I install some web conferencing software called HP Virtual Rooms. Presumably this is software HP uses not only with press, but also for working with partners and even secure internal conferencing.
Despite my many, many reservations about installing an application to gain access to the briefing — especially considering HP’s positively egregious history of spying on reporters — I went ahead with it since otherwise they they couldn’t proceed. Yeah, I should have installed Little Snitch, but I was on the phone with four HP people and was already holding up the show.
So the 64k question with tin-foil hat trimming: would you be worried? Perhaps more importantly, are you brave enough to install and test HP’s Virtual Rooms software yourself? Download it here, hit me back. Where’s Schneier when you need him?
Thursday, March 13th, 2008 - 6:51PM
I’ve had innumerable conversations with friends and colleagues over the years who’ve somehow felt burned by name-your-publication; nowadays even non-celebrities can (and often do) live with a cloud over their head on the internet — and I think if there’s any one truism about the intersection of publicity and online media, it’s that the era of “all press is good press” is long gone. Maybe that’s a given, but here’s exactly why:
The theory used to be that because exposure came party to an ephemeral medium (print), one could usually find value in bad press for its ability to act as a mechanism of discovery and interest-upkeep. This value thought to be inherently greater than any lasting damage, especially when that medium — print — is such a finite commodity, and getting any press at all presented a major challenge. And hey, either way tomorrow morning it’s out of sight, out of mind.
The democratization of niche micro-publishing, though, completely killed the concept of good bad press. Whereas before your press had positive or negative value equatable only to the number of eyeballs who bought and scanned that piece of paper, now any and all exposure you receive is equally findable, be it on the New York Times or on Jim’s Yet-Another-Wordpress Blog. In fact, scratch that — usually the more negative or salacious the exposure, the greater the weight it seems to carry (and thus more probable it is to be highly ranked in search). See: Sarah Lacy.
And, of course, all the upsides to the good bad press seem obviated; the medium is no longer ephemeral, there’s no barrier to entry for publishing OR consuming, and there’s certainly no limit on how many bad things can be said about you (or your company, product, movie, etc.). Anyone can hide from tomorrow’s paper, but no one can hide from nigh-immortal data that’s indexed, cached, and forever more findable.
What’s it mean? Well, maybe that’s not for me to say. But I certainly hope we, as a society that now both consumes and contributes to media at large, can think a little harder about things before hitting the all-powerful publish button.
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 - 2:09AM
Chris Anderson rants about the woeful life of being the editor of a large publication who receives an endless torrent of spammy-smelling PR email from “lazy flacks” — all stuff about which I’ve zero knowledge. (Actually, I’m sure that’s probably where the comparisons end between our jobs — but who knows.) He then leapfrogs the next few traditional steps (namely, hitting the delete key, hitting the unsubscribe link, quickly replying to these people, or even having his assistant call their bosses) and openly publishes the names and email addresses of hundreds of PR people for spammers to have their way with. Um, okay. Chris, it’s not the same.
Let’s cut to the chase: yes, unfortunately most PR people don’t do their homework. They get their target’s email address (from that target’s site, Google, a media list like Bacon’s, or wherever else) and add X editor to whatever blast they’re cooking up because — as you probably know — many of these “flacks” are paid (extra) for results (read: stories in the media about their company / client). Yes, the resulting PR spam is ridiculously irritating and, when ignored, often leads to embarrassingly clueless and time-wasting followup calls.
But these people aren’t out to make our lives harder, and many of them are just doing what they can with what’s become a severely broken system between media relations and the media. For all our communications tools PR often reminds editors more of telemarketing than valued outreach. Can these firms and companies do a better job at targeting the most relevant publications (and editors therein)? No doubt, so in that sense Chris’s post is founded in the right reasons. PR people simply need to do a cursory amount of relationship-building to know who to get in touch with instead of just spamming the top of the food chain in the hopes of a trickled-down story. But I’m still not sure how lofty disinterest and spoon-feeding spam databases is the correct response to a broken system.
(For reference, this is the same problem faced by editors of publications large and small. Personally, I’ve dealt with it for years with some combination of ignoring / deleting, replying with a template, verbally rejecting calls, or in some cases telling the completely misguided ones only to call / email back when they actually grok Engadget and have something directly relevant to our coverage. Ask around, I’m not shy about doing this — it’s better for both parties, so far as I can tell. I even wrote a post about it.)
PR strategists interested in making real changes about this whole process should feel free to get in touch to discuss further. And don’t you dare add my personal email address to any lists! (Joking. But not really.)
