PR is probably a combination of black art, science and luck.
However no matter how good your PR machine is it can all fall apart at the seams if your representatives don’t know how to handle themselves in public
If you take the now infamous web 2.0 fiasco as an example to illustrate this.
One of O’Reilly’s related companies hold a mark of some kind. It’s in their interest to protect it. It’s also in O’Reilly’s interest to promote technologies.
When the legal team “protecting” the mark decided to attack a small Irish not for profit organisation it opened up a can of worms and it took several days for the storm to die down.
It could have been handled a lot better. I would argue that O’Reilly would have been better off not saying anything at all… But that’s just me.
Other companies’ methodologies aren’t much better…
Around the time of the .eu launch we got a letter from a competitor, who also happens to be a .eu registrar, offering us reseller pricing on .eu domains. For a variety of reasons we would never do business with that company, so we ignored the letter – as one does.
A couple of weeks later, after the launch of .eu, we got another letter, but this time from their solicitors! Why? Well they obviously don’t like competition and so they were demanding that we make it explicitly clear that we were not a .eu registrar, but were acting as an agent for one (it seems they sent the same letter to the other big Irish hosting companies as well).
So one minute they want to sell us things then, when we don’t buy anything, they threaten us with legal action? That’s fantastic business sense I must say!
Post-landrush the .eu landscape is settling down again and the entire buzz about .eu seems to have all but vanished (my .eu blog‘s lack of recent posts being a reflection of this).
Of course, in the hosting business, such moments of relative calm often disguise the reality… Several of the smaller Irish hosting companies have taken to squatting .eu domains that infringe our IP and that of some of the larger companies.. More wonderful business practice, but I guess you get used to it (eventually)
But what has all this got to do with PR? Probably not a huge amount, but it leads me to today’s little “bug bear”…
There is a particular company that mines the CRO’s data (though we’ve heard rumours that one of the other hosting companies has also started doing this) and sends personalised letters to new business owners offering them a “great deal” on hosting and domain registration.
I personally do not approve of their business practices, but to each their own.
However I really must question their public interactions….
The company in question were mentioned by someone on a public forum over the weekend in a negative manner. So what?
We all get some bad press from time to time. It’s part and parcel of doing business. However unless someone were to personally attack me or any of my staff I would never even dream of making legal threats. This lot don’t seem to think along those lines.
Instead of diffusing the situation and possibly converting the upset client into a “big fan” they have not only managed to alienate their client, but also sent a very negative message to a lot of other people.
Yet another case of PR going terribly terribly wrong…
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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I think you made a very important point in this post. To the company in question, they may believe that they’re just dealing with one disgruntled customer, so they might not care too much how they handle to case. However, in this age of blogs and message boards, the word gets out very quickly and can turn into a PR nightmare in an instant. The best thing to do, obviously, is to treat every customer complaint and concern as though the proceedings are taking place in the publich eye — which, essentially, is the case anyway.
I liked their original direct mail approach. Very targeted and effective. While it is very expensive it is also taking away the pain and hassle for many business who just don’t know any better, or need to.
However I cant comment on their follow up customer service.
I liked their original direct mail approach. Very targeted and effective. While it is very expensive it is also taking away the pain and hassle for many business who just don’t know any better, or need to.
However I cant comment on their follow up customer service.
Those sons of ***, I only had the business up and running less than a week last year and already had one of those domain name offers in the post!
Wish I knew who you guys are talking about… 🙁
What he said.
I just happened to find the letter this morning, had to keep it last year (dated 3 weeks after business registration) because I thought it was so ridiculous. If they had actually done any research on the nature of the business as opposed to firing out a letter and sales pitch they would know that I neither required a domain name or web hosting, or design services for that matter.
They were, however, kind enough to offer me several variations on domain names that I had already registered for the business…
The company in question in this case was/is a dublin based company.
I got the same letter when I started up my company. The offered me my company name with either .net or .org. If they had checked who the .com domain was registered to, they would have notised that I had already registered my domain name!!!
I can’t remember the name of the company as it was early this year…
I have to say I’m with Alan on the direct mail approach. Many companies do direct mail campaigns … and mostly irritate 99% of the recipients. This one was targetted to people that it was actually relevant to, and customised for each company. If all the direct mails I received were as appropriate it’d only be a good thing.
Ed – So basically you would consider sending unsolicited mails to people who registered business names?
I got one of these letters from the unnamed ‘hosting’ ‘company’ just 1 day after i received my registration back from the CRO, again, it was hardly well suited to the business I run offering a ‘design’ service to me. Charging x amount for template set up and exorbitant hosting fees put me off, aside from their mailing approach (which i was more annoyed that the CRO – a necessary, unavoidable registration process was selling data)
Jonathan – I don’t think they do any checking of who they are sending the letters to… they sent me one a few months ago 🙂