Blogs and Libel - or Damn, NKK!

Here's a simple lesson in public relations, thanks to BusinessWeek. It's a great tale to show to clients, to show that even working with a reporter on an article does not ensure that your client is going to get press.

Now, this is purely conjecture, but reading the article on Wikis, it makes me think that the reporter must have worked with a PR firm, PR person, PR something or other. It's too perfect a hit.

Read the article. It is well written and explanatory about Wikis and why/how they are changing companies email usage. Well, Wikis and Collaboration Software. The article has great background on the subject. The article talks to companies using Wikis. The article refers to large corporations that are using such collaboration tools, and extensively interviews the managing director at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein with a great descriptive opening paragraph on how he's trashed his Blackberry.

Someone in PR set this up. Just a guess, but it sounds too much like the footwork I have done for reporters for my clients. I can point out two great such articles from Communication Arts and Wall Street Journal, where the client was the main focus of the article, albeit the article was on the space as a whole. It's called doing good PR, and getting information to the reporter.

However, while the article is great, it's anticlimactic. Why? Well, I have no idea about any Wiki or Collaboration software platforms. The article mentions no one at all. The article might have been set up by SocialText or Jotspot, but you would not know that because ... no one is ever mentioned.

So, that's the PR lesson here. You can work your fingers to the bone, tell the client you have a potential great hit coming ... and come up empty-handed. Why did the reporter not mention any of the companies? Only she really knows.

Hat tip to Allan Jenkins for the article.

UPDATE: Chris Edwards at Hacking Cough did the digging that I did not, and found out that the Wiki being used is from ... SocialText.


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