That’s a snippet of a five hour Google chat I had until 3 a.m. because of the kindness of Andrés Bianciotto, a friend I know through social networking. He generously and skillfully helped me recover from a spam attack by PR Week and their email consulting firm, Adicio.com Adicio and PR Week offered excuses that are lame and lamer, but I still had to get my corrupted computer running.
But this isn’t a post about why PR Week sucks or why Adicio.com sucks. It’s a post about the real impact of social media on corporate reputation. And about the cluelessness of the PR industry in general about social media, and the inability — or maybe it’s the refusal — of corporations to believe that consumers really do have the tools and the power to influence brand reputation and sales.
I keep the social network Twitter on my desktop all day, checking in regularly, like nearly a million other people, including the digerati, popular bloggers, top marketing consultants, journalists, some actually very sharp PR people, and a few corporate types who are trying to figure out this new media thing.
Corporate CMOs, CEOs, CFOs, listen up – what is said and done in Twitter and other social networks has more to do with your brand reputation than anything else you are doing to sell your goods and services. That’s where I chronicled my nightmarish experience with PR Week and Adicio. That’s also what caused several people around the globe to call, email, and direct message offers of help.
Twitter has become one of the main places where I get news, learn of interesting websites, events, ideas, people, and places before they hit mainstream media – usually long before. It’s also where I have established a solid and growing network of successful, smart, often funny, kind, interesting and prolific colleagues, like Andrés Bianciotto. Anyone who doesn’t fit those terms, or who tries to use Twitter for heavy-handed self-promotion or sales, is blocked, over, gone, doesn’t exist anymore.
Are we early-adopter social networkers scary? Only if you fail to understand that we also are open to listening to you, to working with you, advising you, and friending you if you act like a human and not pimp your sales message 24/7.
PR Week and Adicio, I just want you out of my life. But before you go, PR Week and Adicio.com, I want you to do two things:
o refund the $161 I paid to buy Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac after your “incident” corrupted my Microsoft identity database and rendered Word and Entourage unusable.
o send me one of those iPods you talked about in those thousands of emails in your “incident”
PR Week and Adicio.com: this post will soon be in the top search results for PR Week and Adicio.com.
An aside: When I burst into tears while telling this story to the tech folks at Tekserve, they handed me one of the tissues kept at every station because “almost everyone who comes in here is crying.”Posted by BL Ochman
UPDATE: PR Week editor Julia Hood just called me to say that they will meet my demands and are FedExing me a check for the cost of Microsoft Office 2008 and of the iPod that was the prize in the errant emails. As blog coverage noise rises, I’m moving forward, but I don’t think PR Week or Adicio have heard the last on the issue.
Why Social Media – And Andrés Bianciotto – Rock and Why PR Week & Adicio Still Suck
BL Ochman | February 1, 2008 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) | TrackBack (
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Categories: Alternative Marketing, B.L. Ochman, Blogging and Moblogging, Business Communications, Buzz, Cross Media, Customer Service Issues, Global Business, Internet strategy, Marketing Strategy, Peer to peer, Peer-to-peer, PR Cluelessness, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Thought Leaders, Trends, User Generated Content, Word of Mouth, Worst Practices
Tags: , Adicio.com, Adicio.com spams, Andrés Bianciotto, BL Ochman, PR Week email incident, PR Week spams thousands, social media marketing, social networking, Twitter, worst practices
Tags: , Adicio.com, Adicio.com spams, Andrés Bianciotto, BL Ochman, PR Week email incident, PR Week spams thousands, social media marketing, social networking, Twitter, worst practices
Oh my! I subscribe to PR Week and their daily newsletter. I thankfully didn’t get caught in the spam that you experienced. The fact that you had to turn to your own network to resolve this problem is unfortunate.
As this issue starts populating through the blogosphere (I personally linked to your experience earlier on my blog), I can imagine the direct impact this will have on Adicio’s business.
Good luck BL!
It will be interesting to see how PR Week responds to this crisis in its newspaper.
In addition to doing all the things you suggested, I think PR Week columnist Hamilton Nolan, who writes the weekly “PR Play of the Week” column, should write about what happened. In each column, he writes about a PR play and assigns it a score of 1 (clueless) to 5 (ingenious).
What you and thousands of others had to endure makes this a big fat 1, regardless of who’s at fault.
P.S. I’m in Week #2 of StomperNet’s 12-week social media coaching program, so your post is of particular interest, BL.
What a mess to have to deal with.
I don’t subscribe to PR Week (fortunately), but to avoid future email problems, I highly suggest you don’t use Entourage. I did for years and after the 3rd time it started eating emails in my inbox (I tend to save them as well until a job is totally finished), I called a web developer colleague who told me to use iMail. He’d had the same problems and switched as well.
Since then, not a single problem. It took a little while to get used to but it’s not bloated like Entourage, you can sync address books and it’s dependable.
Hope the rest of the month goes much smoother!
Glad to hear that PR Week is refunding you the money for the software. And the free iPod, too.
It pisses me off that they’re trying to sweep the whole mess under the rug and not trying to compensate the thousands of other affected subscribers.
In your opinion, do you think they would have agreed to refund your money if you weren’t a famous blogger?
I imagine that your internet status was at least a factor in the decision. What about the little guys? I think a free subscription and a iPod is the least they can do– on top of any documented financial loss.