Tag Archive for 'pr_agencies'

Bad Reputation

Published
by
David Parmet
on 6/7/2006
in Mouthing Off
. Comments

One of my very first bosses gave me a very good bit of advice. There are only 50 or so people in any given industry, she said, so make it a point not to piss too many of them off. Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications (see, I know it’s all caps!) has a tale of a unnamed Boston area PR firm asked by a client to hand over its work products to the new agency - SHIFT. At a hand-off meeting, a VP of the incumbent agency decided to act like an asshat.

No big surprise, I’ve worked in agencies and have known plenty of asshats. But Todd makes a great point about the consequences of acting like an asshat.

Consider how badly this one dumb move could hurt their business.

  • The client will never again consider calling that agency.
  • The client contacts present during the hand-off meeting won’t ever call them into an agency review, when they invariably move on to their next gigs.
  • I will never recommend this agency in instances where we might have a newbiz conflict.

It gets worse. We talked about their poor attitude in an HQ staff meeting:

  • 50-odd PR people in the Boston market now consider this agency to have a “black mark” against it.
  • They won’t ever interview there as prospective employees.
  • They won’t ever think to invite that firm to compete for their business, if they ever take an in-house marketing post.

All because some agency VP got pissy about turning over a few memos and databases.

Pissy, arrongent behavior is a given in most PR firms. It’s nice to see it’s not treated as a given all of the time.

The grass is always greener

Published
by
David Parmet
on 1/25/2006
in Mouthing Off
. Comments

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.

Measuring up

Published
by
David Parmet
on 1/9/2006
in Required Reading
. Comments

From Cymphony’s Marketing Insight: Would PR Rather Not Be Measured?

Like whistling in a graveyard…

Here’s a test. Wait about six months after you lose a client. Then think about the last time you read something or saw something on TV or the Internet about the client. Probably never. That’s because most agencies operate in a bubble.

After a while it’s easier to believe the glowing words of the monthly report than it is to face the fact that 99.99% of all companies today are somewhere below airborne viruses and way below elementary school teachers and librarians in having any impact on the world. At all.

It’s easier to drink the Kool Aid.

It’s not the size that matters

Published
by
David Parmet
on 1/4/2006
in Required Reading
. Comments

Steve Rubel has some great advice for PR types obsessed with the eternal circulation question.

It doesn’t matter if you booked your client on the Today Show, if the audience your client needs to reach is watching something else. And if the blog you just got your client that big hit on has a readership of 50 - if it’s the 50 people you have to reach, you hit a home run.

One of the major problems I saw as an agency person - well ONE of the major problems - is the “column inch” theory of measuring the impact of a PR campaign. Let’s say you get your client five column inches in BusinessWeek and five column inches in some small town newspaper. Which do you think will count as more impactful in the column inch method?

Now imagine that all of the client’s potential customers happen to live within the bounds of that small town where you got them five column inches. Which story do you think really had more impact?

And at my last agency - which hit do you think got the account team more recognition from the bosses?

Just plain clueless

Published
by
David Parmet
on 12/29/2005
in Stupid Agency Tricks
. Comments

Jeremy Pepper points out the real fallout for PR and marketing bloggers from Jeremy Hermann’s recent adventure with Alaska Airlines.

Anyone care to take a wager that the muckity mucks at Alaska Airlines urged their minions to make those comments on Hermann’s blog?

In my conversations with PR agency types over the past couple of years about how to engage the blogosphere this is exactly the type of ‘engagement’ most agency higher ups envision on behalf of their clients. Not that I’m going to name names but in the past year a VP at one agency told me he’d ’sue the pants off of anyone who blogged about my clients’ (not very likely). The head of another firm told me he was really excited to get his clients in the blogosphere because his staff could just ‘cut and paste clients’ releases into the comments section.’ And in this here blog I’ve had to clear out comments from agency bots pretending to be just plain folk.

These are probably the same people who respond to help wanteds with their company email address.

The question for 2006 is.. what are we all going to do about this?\

Update: Blogebrity asks the truly important question…. what, no podcast?