Is There Still a Place for Discretion? November 3, 2006
So this is kind of weird.
There has been a big flap over at Techcrunch regarding how they select the hot start up companies they cover. Basically, Techcrunch wrote an article about a company called Maya’s Mom and did not cover one of its competitors, Mother’s Click. The folks at Mother’s Milk got angry and accused Techcrunch of writing about Maya’s Mom due solely to a personal relationship Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has with the founder of the company.
You can read the original article from Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington about the situation here and a follow up post here.
But what’s really interesting is that Mother’s Milk’s PR firm, SHIFT Communications, has posted a thinly veiled entry absolving themselves of responsibility for the situation. They explain that the client is to blame for the situation.
It sounds like they are right and that the client is to blame here. But still.
As a consultant myself, I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t have made the post that SHIFT Communications made. I just don’t think the post serves any purpose beyond making the client look bad and the PR firm look good.
Am I a dinosaur? Is this sort of openness by consultants the future? I tend to think there is still a place for discretion. What do you think?
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The move by Shift doesn’t make any sense in the context of the known facts - PR firms exist to get positive publicity for their clients, and this is them generating negative publicity for theirs.
Which leads me to speculate that there are facts we don’t know. For example, in the wake of the MothersMilk/TC debacle, it seems pretty likely that MothersMilk have got themselves a new PR firm, if only because a smart PR-er probably looked at the situation and said “hey, we could do a better job than that” and made picked up the phone. They have’t announced it yet…but Shift probably know…so it makes sense for them to get a release out saying “this wasn’t our fault” that they can point to in the future and say “look, we were saying this wasn’t our fault even before we were fired, so it’s not just sour grapes”.
All assumes good strategy on the part of all the players, ofc, and the absence of good strategy might instead be the fact we don’t know. But that’s my guess for what’s going on.
While Todd Defren’s post is interesting (esp. since I think it implies the client relationship is still there), I would assume that he has a good relationship with the client to be able to make that post.
PR firms are pretty quiet, so I don’t think Todd was doing any damage-control for his firm with the post.
I’m not sure I would’ve done what he did, but again, it depends on the relationship. Plus, what Seamus said, there are probably things going on that we do not know about (and it’s none of our business).
Mike
Seamus/Mike - I’m sure there is more going on here than we are aware. And it certainly isn’t my intention to pile on here.
I mostly posted because I think there is a line somewhere between being transparent (which is admirable) and being indiscreet (which isn’t). This felt indiscreet to me.
The only clarification that I’d make re: “there is more to the story” is that we are still Mothersclick’s PR agency, and that that relationship was never in jeopardy. Mothersclick execs are very happy with the relationship and with the coverage they’ve received in other outlets. If anything, we were willing to let them go because their unwillingness to follow our counsel put our agency’s reputation in jeopardy.
And that, I’d suggest, is the key point. Let me make it again: by not only refusing our counsel but by actively flouting it, the client jeopardized our agency’s hard-won reputation.
And “Reputation” is all anyone’s really got, eh? The line between transparency and discretion gets crossed when you’re forced to play defense with your reputation.
I “thinly veiled” the Mothersclick relationship in the original post cuz the client was truly sorry by the time I posted, and I saw no need to pile on.
Day in, day out, the blog is about lessons learned, not about covering my ass.