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.
NDA's are overused.
ReplyDeleteTo be truly a scoop they should be given to only a precious few, not the masses. When you NDA the masses you end up with one "mass" who goofs and you end up alienating all those you wanted to reward and rewarding all those you wanted to alienate.
Charles is absolutely right. A hundred journalists? And you're wondering how it leaked ? Seriously? And you've got bloggers in the mix? Unless you've got a story that's so complex that journalists need to go to night school for a week just to report on it responsibly, I'd release it when it needs to be released and expect the media to do their job. Our clients should expect no less - from them or us.
ReplyDeleteI am extremely reluctant to use the embargo mechanism, not because of the potential for leaks or scoops by either journalists or bloggers, but because I don't think it's fair to either clients or the media. It can backfire in all sorts of ways, some of them unexpected. The one time I was involved with a major embargoed announcement we ending up getting one of our major television networks to do a phoner because all their news crews had been deployed to other locations. We'd embargoed the release because we knew we had very limited spokesperson availability on the day of the release. I would approach the whole thing very differently if I were doing it again, use a different spokesperson who was available all day rather than for just an hour and a half following the announcement, and offer 1:1s for the week following the release.
ReplyDeleteNot only would this have made thing easier for the client, I think it would also have resulted in deeper, richer, and better quality coverage.
Those are pretty harsh words for bloggers as a generalization. I, for one, always respect embargoes WHEN a company is courteous enough to provide me with advance news. Unfortunately, few companies give "bloggers" that courtesy - perhaps because of the attitudes that come with such generalizations.
ReplyDeleteThis leaves bloggers with a fend-for-yourself kind of feeling and "accidentally leaked" news becomes legit, breaking news as a way to level the playing field with other sources that are "in" with companies.
I know there are some that will disrespect embargoes and NDA's just because; however, I feel that lumping all bloggers into one box is part of the problem.
For the most part, you've got a well-stated post here, but some bloggers are more professional than others.