How Contacting a Blogger Without Actually Reading His Blog Spells Trouble for Your Organization (and How to Fix It)

It looks like Boing Boing has received a rather unpleasant letter from UK-based global law firm Baker & McKenzie.

The motivation for the letter - which was written on behalf of B&M client Infront Sports & Media - appears to be the concern that the footage of the upcoming World Cup competition will be illegally shared over the Web. Apparently, Boing Boing was identified by these legal eagles as a potential violator of their client’s copyright.

The trouble is that, as Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder pointed out, everyone at Boing Boing thinks sports are rather stupid. Of the World Cup he wrote, “we would sooner stream a video of a crumpled up paper napkin in the corner of a room than show some jackasses running after a ball.”

Now, as much as I think Frauenfelder is really missing out by not tuning in to the occasional baseball game, I have to agree with him that B&M has created a rather sorry state of affairs. Bloggers don’t take very kindly to being threatened, particularly when the threat comes from this far out of left field. And we don’t take very kindly to being contacted by people who have never read our blog and don’t care about what we write.

B&M has gotten itself, and it’s client into a dilly of a pickle here. The double-whammy of threatening a blogger in the same breath with which you reveal your total ignorance of his work is quite possibly the dumbest thing a company has done in the blogosphere since an Ad Agency sued a blogger and then withdrew the suit when it realized the PR fallout.

Our advice for B&M is simple. Since stonewalling would only turn this screwup into a trifecta of common blogosphere mistakes, your only course of action is to apologize to Boing Boing and admit that you’ve learned a valuable lesson here. One of the great things about the blogosphere is that even when you do screw up massively, it’s fairly easy to fix your mistakes if you just face them head on.

Via The Blog Herald.