The Mike Arrington / Tello shitstorm is fascinating not for what it reveals about the participants but for what it reveals about how some PR agencies treat bloggers.
First of all, the question of astroturfing is settled. The comments on TechCrunch are clearly astroturf. No debate there. If it’s Tello or their PR agency, that’s a whole different issue and that’s for Mike to say if he has the proof. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were one or both.
Now here’s where it get’s interesting. Morgan McLintic from Tello’s PR agency, LewisPR, responding to Jeremy Pepper says:
Since this is a B2B proposition, the approach in the main has been to focus on the business press.
B2B means nothing anymore. It’s a distinction that with grunge bands and cheap oil, should have been left behind in the 90s. Your client could be classic B2B and your most important target could be a blogger who reaches 200 sets of eyeballs a day.
And B2B never meant “focus on the business press” at all. I’ve had B2B clients we’d pitch to Maintenance Monthly long before we’d even think about BusinessWeek because that was where the customers were.
Mike has come under fire here for leaping to the conclusion that you either go for MSM OR blogs. And that to prioritize one, negates the importance of the other, which is not true.
Really? Do you want to show me where Mike says that?
In fact it’s PR people, like Morgan, who say things like that (like you just did Morgan, right there). It’s PR agencies that still play that silly game of Tier One, Tier Two and Tier Three. They put Forbes and BusinessWeek in Tier One and those silly little bloggers in Tier Three and Tier Three gets ‘reached out to’ about a week after the launch.
Sillies!
With any start up with finite resources (from spokespeople, to marketing team, to PR spend) you need to focus.
Yes. Exactly. Which is why you focus on the outlets that matter the most to the people your client needs to reach. If the suits are buying it, hit BusinessWeek, if it’s the telco guy, you better get Telephony on the line. And if your ‘B2B’ client needs to reach telco geeks, better get MobileCrunch.
One regret might be to have briefed Mike beforehand and to have saved him from this flaming – most of which is not about Tello but a broader discussion.
That’s an interesting assertion. No comment.
Perhaps we all learned something. I know our team did.
Yeah, don’t piss off bloggers.
Update: It’s official – astroblogging is now a word.
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