Bloggers and Embargos -- Like Oil and Water

Perhaps this has happened to you. A client has had perhaps a hundred journalists (in the US and abroad) sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent the media from reporting a story in advance of the official launch date. In exchange for signing the NDA, the reporters got more access to privileged information in advance about the upcoming news (images, interviews with key company parties, press releases, PowerPoint, etc.).

 

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.  

RSS: Really Simple Stupid

a>You are not stupid. You are smart. I am stupid.

I say this because for a long time I was using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and I didn’t know it. I have a Google gmail account because I grew tired of my Hotmail address at about the same time they started asking for money for more storage. Also, I thought that “@hotmail” was kind of amateurish, along with my “@yahoo” address. I am neither a Bill Gates fan nor a Yahoo, and I wanted to be elitist, eat arugula, and show my love of Google.

Gmail got me to start using iGoogle, a service for those with gmail accounts to have a customizable landing page. My iGoogle site gives me what regular Google.com gives me, but it also enables me to display widgets (the weather, a world clock, my horoscope) and news items of my choosing (Slate, The Onion, Politico, New York Times, Newsweek). Grabbing the top stories from the publications that I read is very easy with iGoogle, and because my iGoogle page is my homepage in my browser, I am up to speed on all major global news that I care about.

Then, after years of envying my friends and colleagues, I bought an iPod. Not a touch -- I’m not that tricked out yet. And I started using iTunes to download podcasts for free (National Public Radio’s “This American Life” is one of my favorites). The iTunes interface easily helped me find free podcasts and subscribe to them so I can listen to podcasts and view videos whenever I like.

OK, so as I was using iGoogle and iTunes, I didn’t realize that subscribing to news, podcasts and videos was only possible because of RSS. (Like I said, I was stupid.) But I want you all to know that I am getting smarter. I’ve even started to use RSS to get news updates in my Outlook email folders.

If you practice PR and you haven’t gotten into RSS yet then now is the time. If you’re relying on Google alerts to get news about your clients and their competitors, that’s great. But what if you want to read the latest articles as they come online from your target publications? In that case, you can either set up an iGoogle account, or you can do what I have done with Outlook.

First, do some web searches and find the publications, sections of publications, blogs, or whatever you want to read on a regular basis. Then, in Internet Explorer click on this symbol:



When you click on that symbol (sometimes called the RSS Chicklet) you will see an address pop up for a new URL in your web browser window. Copy that URL (control C).

Now, start your Outlook email program and do the following:

1. On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
2. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New.
3. In the New RSS Feed dialog box, type or press CTRL+V to paste the URL of the RSS Feed. For example, http://www.example.com/feed/main.xml.
4. Click Add.
5. Click OK.
   
Now, you will begin to see in your Outlook Mail Folders articles popping up under the RSS Chicklet folder. Those new RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to will be filled up with news that you care about the minute the news is posted to the Internet.

If you care about getting news from the outlets, reporters or bloggers you track, then you have to try setting up RSS feeds in Outlook.

Now, you probably feel a whole lot smarter…I would love to hear how it’s working for you.