How Not To Do PR

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...