Valley PR Blog

Learning from bad Pitches –the FH way

By Angelo Fernando on June 21st, 2007 In Social Media

How would you handle being called out by the blogosphere? What’s your damage control game plan?

D avid Jones, of Fleishman-Hillard Toronto writes about an incident around that walking-on-eggshells activity known as blogger outreach.

At issue: Fleishman pitched a story without getting permission, or taking time to get to know the persons being pitched to. There was push back. So very quickly, Jones did the right thing and addressed the issue. It’s that ‘condescending no-no. “We big agency types have to watch out for that,” David says.

Two odd things about this: First, the pitch was to bloggers from a blogger. Second, Jones named the person at the company, even though he didn’t need to. “Odd” as in very courageous!

Sometimes taking that extra step may not be in the handbook, so to speak. But it adds a fresh supply of oxygen to help everyone, those offended included, take a deep breath and move on.

What impressed me too, was the fact that Fleishman-Hillard empowers its people to be totally transparent about things that lesser organizations would prefer to sweep under the carpet.

Comments

Hey, Angelo. I appreciate your analysis. One thing I didn’t make abundantly clear in my post about our blogger relations mishap was that the blogger in question was named on one of the blogs that took issue with the pitch. So, I didn’t “out” the blogger. Out of respect to my colleague, I made her aware of the content of my post and that her name was being used.

You’re right that FH takes our commitment to social media very seriously and hold ourselves as professional communicators and bloggers to very high standards. We handled this incident in exactly the same way we’d counsel our clients to: quickly, transparently and with honesty and courage. There have been worse errors made by PR firms in social media, but I think we handled this in the best way possible.

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