The Bad Pitch Blog writes a scathing post today, criticising the practises of PR agency HWH PR and their habit of turning client news releases into PR spam.
The Bad Pitch Blog even went so far as to 'honour' them with a Lifetime Achievement Award (pictured) - though I think that if it was a bad pitch then the ball should be falling out of the glove, not neatly caught in it.
This post may represent a change of tact in the battle against PR spam: creating public appeals to the brand owner rather than the PR agency itself. As the post says:
To Samsung, Westinghouse Digital and Dotster I ask if you want people like this representing your brand.
Blasting news releases to anyone with an email address and ignoring their replies is not practicing media relations – it’s spamming. They’ve done a bad enough job handling media relations on their clients' behalf that I’m forced to call these brands into question.
When the people that you are paying to represent your brand start to tarnish it, it poses a major risk to the reputation of your brand. Firstly from the intial spam that these people are sending, but secondly from the extended implications of this, namely that your brand has chosen these people to represent them and are still paying them despite a large amount of complaints from the journalist community.
It's becoming increasingly important for brands to not only listen to what is being said about them, but also to listen to what is being said about the people they outsource work to and who represent their company. If they don't and respond in the correct way to any negative feedback (e.g. when journalists consistently complain, find a new PR agency and ensure that they are representing the company in the right way), then they risk damaging their brand and losing trust from the communities, including journalists, that they are trying to reach.
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