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.
“What. Were. They. Thinking.”
Fantasies of old-school control continue unabated . . .
Tim,
PR isn’t broken - it’s many of the practitioners in our industry who need to be educated. I actually get press releases from other agencies and I own a PR firm. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I get a kick out of it and then use the correspondence to remind my staff what not to do.
And embargos do work - occasionally. We very rarely use embargos (unlike other firms that use them often) and we only use an embargo with someone we have a long-standing relationship with. We broke a national story last week using an embargo. We worked with one TV outlet, one major radio outlet and one important print outlet. We have relationships with all of them and the story took off. It can be done, but should be done with planning and caution.
Gina Rubel
The PR Lawyer
http://www.theprlawyer.com