I’ve worked with Marshall Kirkpatrick, formerly of TechCrunch and now of Read/Write Web many times and have always found him easy to deal with. A real straight shooter.
And as a publicist, you learn that you can’t put words in the mouths (or on the pages) of journalists and bloggers alike. You can serve the story up but at some point the Law of Murphy takes over.
Well Murphy must have been looking after whomever handles PR for Amazon because they really screwed the pouch on this one. As Marshall put it:
The long and short of it is this: Amazon has nothing to say; they told us they did, but they don’t. If they do have anything to say they would like to say it through words put into my mouth. Thanks, Amazon. I don’t think you’ve got much Openness to bring to my Social even if that is what you intend to do.
The full story is here. PR people should read it and tremble.
Even in my capacity as a D-list blogger, I get so many ‘embargoed’ releases from PR agencies who are just praying for a hit, any hit, that they think by blindly offering up releases stamped ‘embargoed’ they’ll get their pitches read by someone. I even considered starting a blog of releases put out a day or two before their official embargo dates. It’s a stupid game to play and even dumber when done with such a high profile client like Amazon. And to top it all off, the PRbots offered Marshall language, written in the first person, to put on his blog to clarify the situation.
What. Were. They. Thinking.
