There have been two recent incidents of PR professionals being called out in the blogosphere for their actions. The first was a poorly mail-merged form letter to 37signals from Schwartz Communication which ignited over 51 comments to date. The other, professional blogger and tech maven Steve Rubel of Edelman Twittering about his PC Mag subscription (which he throws in the trash) that caught the ire of editor in chief Jim Louderback. I find both of these events interesting for a couple of reasons.

The first, Schwartz’s letter to 37signals. The comments either lauded 37signals for bringing this to the attention of their readers as a lesson learned, or condemned them for trying to ridicule a company who merely made a mistake. I won’t take sides other than to say that, as PR pros, we know how quickly bloggers can react to a situation and make a small situation quite public. That being said, I found it odd that Schwartz’s business development person who signed off on the letter wasn’t one of the first to respond to the negative comments or to the post in general. Their VP did end up posting and apologizing, but he was the LAST comment – coming in THREE days later! This would have been a perfect opportunity to show what many agencies preach to their client; monitor the blogosphere, be proactive and join the discussion. While Schwartz joined the discussion, in my opinion it seemed to be a little late in the game.

The second incident between Rubel and PC Mag is interesting on a whole different front. While Rubel did respond to the back and forth, he used one of the oldest apologies in the book - the qualifier. He pulled the “I apologize if you…” instead of “I apologize that I….” which really means I am sorry your feelings were hurt, but I didn’t do anything wrong. Louderbeck eventually took the high road by offering to even buy the drink next time they met (see the comments below the post). Despite his initial frustration at Rubel’s comment, Louderback cannot realistically “black ball” Edelman clients from being covered in PC Mag due to the big name clients the firm represents. However, if this had been one of us (smaller agencies) who had offended a media contact as important as PC Magazine, I feel the reaction would have been quite different. It would have been much easier for Louderback to ignore our pitches (not saying that he would) and encourage that all BLAST contacts be ignored. Why? Because Edelman clients have the political backing of Microsoft and Apple etc. We really wouldn’t expect any outlet to stop reporting on Microsoft because of a feud with an agency PR rep, but what if instead it was a startup tech company with a breakthrough product?