How PR fails customers

by admin on June 29, 2006

in General

I’ve hesitated about posting this as naming names is always risky. But as I know UK professional accountants are very wary of PR and that’s this blog’s primary audience here goes.

Customer references are one of the most important differentiators in helping people decide whether your firm is the right choice. But do they/will they talk in the public domain? PR should provide a way to enable that process but some UK PR firms don’t get it. I say ‘some’ because I’ve not done enough empirical research on this to quantify whether it is some/most/nearly all. Here’s an example.

The other week I was looking for input to a short notice (yes it is part of the problem so let’s be fair) feature for Real Finance. I was specific about asking for FD/CFO types. I sent emails to that effect. I received copies of emails sent to the editor in response to the original feature proposal they’d put out. Here’s a selection:

  • Ahmed Huzman, ICS: RSinteract, enables non-technical users such as FDs to easily navigate to different views (reports) without the need for intervention or support from the IT department. Question from me: Got any FD types I can talk to? Answer: No.
  • Dan Bleakman, bite communications ltd: I work with Sage here in the UK and would be happy to provide anything/put forward a spokesperson. I was already interviewing a Sage customer so client communications are not so hot – eh?
  • Janne Virtanen MCC Int’l: Client – Temtec. I was wondering if you would like some input from Temtec. Temtec was taken out by Applix 15th June. Email sent by Janne 19th June.

Several bloggers made really helpful suggestions in email to me. I used my own contacts to get others to speak.

I leave it to you to judge whether PR is helpful. What I can say, after more than 10 years of asking UK PR firms to provide customer references, the types of response I’m receiving above are pretty typical. Nothing has changed. It’s one reason that despite being super critical of vendors (at times), I’ve made it a point to work hard on not falling out with contacts – including PR types who do try and be genuinely helpful. Of which most live in the blogosphere.

All of which reminds me of the classic line in Heat when Al Pacino, who is under severe time pressure to catch a gang of crooks and who says to his snitch: “Don’t waste my motherf***ing time.” I know the feeling.

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Dan Bleakman

Good to have a discussion offline Dennis, as you say no-one wants a war, which is something I'd never want to do! I enjoyed chatting with you, which is what this should all be about.

All the best

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Dennis Howlett

I have taken this offline in order to deal with the specifics and I don't want a war as it doesn't help anyone.

Suffice to say I don't fully agree with Dan but I've explained why and I have conceded a couple of points in the fine detail.

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Dan Bleakman

I read with interest your blog on ‘How PR fails customers’ and feel that the article you wrote, and indeed my response needs to be put into slightly more context.

Firstly, I couldn’t agree more with your comment that ‘customer references are one of the most important differentiators in helping people decide whether your firm is the right choice.’ Any good PR person should know that as far as features are concerned, finding a customer is vital to securing good coverage, and is something I actively encourage all my clients to do.

Secondly, I feel your readers should read my response in its full context, so as not to arouse any confusion. My initial email query was addressed to the editors of the publication (as you rightly pointed out), as I had a specific question for them:

“Are you still taking contributions for the feature?”

As you can see from the full email below, it was not a response to the feature itself, if it had been I would certainly look to provide much more specific information than was contained in my email. So in actual fact, my email in full read:

“Hi Richard/Christian, (editors)

I think you guys are on deadline this week, so hence the email, but I just wondered if you were still taking contributions for the BI feature, planned for July/Aug? If so, I work with Sage here in the UK and would be happy to provide anything/put forward a spokesperson.”

I also note that in your posting you comment that you sent emails to the effect that you were looking for specific user FD/CFO types. However the synopsis also states that the article will seeking to speak to BI Vendors too. I quote from the synopsis:

“The problem with business intelligence? If you’ve never used an analysis package, you don’t know what you’re missing. So we’ve been talking to BI vendors and user FDs to find the eight best things about having performance management information at your fingertips.”

I feel that your posting takes my email out of context, given that you only selected to quote half of the query I sent to the editors. So despite the fact that my email was indeed a query to the editors, I was also not wrong in my interpretation of the synopsis in that BI vendors were also being sort for comment – hence my offer of a spokesperson.

Finally, with regards to your comment surrounding the communication between myself and my client, I’d be interested to know if you spoke directly to my client to obtain a customer for the feature, or whether you dealt with the customer directly. I feel it’s necessary to understand this, before we can ascertain as to whether or not there was indeed a breakdown in communications.

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