Then, your worst nightmare becomes reality. One of those reporters, misreading the embargo date, publishes the story online in advance of the embargo date. Your client calls you as soon as the Google Alert hits his BlackBerry and being a PR professional you follow up with the unfortunate reporter and ask her to take the news off the site. The reporter explains that she feels horrible about the mistake – it was the web team who mistakenly posted the news – and she takes immediate action to take it down. “Phew!” you say to yourself. “I was able to save the day. Now hopefully no one saw the leaked news.”
Yeah, right. In our online world, the spread of news moves faster than a California wildfire. In that brief hosting of leaked news online, other news sites that monitor for your client were also alerted, and then moved swiftly to grab that content and post it on their own sites. After all, they weren’t briefed under NDA, so for all they know they’re just circulating news they didn’t get via your press release. By this point, all of the reporters that signed NDAs are asking themselves if they should post the news or wait until the date and time on the legal form they signed comes to pass.
Then your client calls requesting that you approach all of the sites that have posted the news in advance. If you have relationships with the sites, they’ll understand and probably take the news down. But what happens if they’re a blog? If they’re a blog they may reply: “As we were not briefed on the topic and didn't sign an NDA we can't in good faith remove a story that's now or was public. I think it's best for all parties involved to learn from this mistake and to move on.”
Universally, I have found bloggers to hold NDAs and embargos in disdain. These official marketing tools don’t jibe with their generally snarky attitude. One part of me understands this. After all, we read blogs precisely because they are snarky, opinionated and anti-authority. And they want to get a scoop just like any journalist. On the other hand, PR practitioners provide special access to their clients for a reason: to ensure that the story is told correctly. Without that access, the bloggers can only speculate on what others have reported, rather than report facts.
What’s a PR flak to do? It’s impossible to brief everyone in advance so they’re ready to go live with news at the right time. Some sites won’t even sign an NDA if you want them to. And rarely does a company take any sort of legal action against a reporter who breaks an embargo – they don’t want to sour the relationship and they understand that mistakes can (and will) happen.
I’m not writing that we should abandon the process of getting reporters to sign NDA forms just because they’re not usually enforced and we can’t get the world to sign an NDA. If only one or two sites leak news, then they’re not really diminishing the big bang on launch day. And once a reporter has signed an NDA, they traditionally respect them. But never expect a blogger to hold to an embargo date (unless you have a great relationship and they’ve signed an NDA) or to remove leaked news. What you can expect is that the second something is on the Internet, it’s there to stay. As long as bloggers treat the marketing process with disdain, they will continue to miss out on full pre-announcement briefings. And, the likely outcome of being shunned by the very companies they should be courting.
