Businesses in the Blogosphere: Is the Tide Turning?

Last week, I posted about blogger John Scalzi’s run-in with Guerilla Marketing and PR. A Guerilla staffer sent Scalzi a pitch e-mail full of condescending marketing jargon that made the firm look like they hadn’t a clue about the blogosphere.

On Friday, Guerilla President & CEO Michael Leifer left a comment for Scalzi apologizing and explaining the misstep:

Each of our outreach emails are crafted for a specific target audience and typically go through a quality control and approval process. As I’m sure you are well aware, mistakes occur within even the most strategic marketing campaigns and, unfortunately, you mistakenly received an email that was specifically developed for outreach to a database of comedic fansites (thus the affiliate-focused offer and tone).

Aside from containing messages that were not tailored specifically to you, the email you received was crafted by a Guerilla staffer who took it upon herself to make creative changes to the approved email copy, which resulted in language that was far more cutesy, “salesy”, immature, unprofessional and generic than any which Guerilla pr typically recommends using- with any audience. The copy in the email was not approved by anyone at Guerilla PR, nor by anyone at Napster.

The Guerilla staffer was fired for her decision to make unapproved changes to the copy.

As Scalzi notes, some of his readers are skeptical of Leifer’s sincerity:

Many of the commenters seriously doubt the sincerity of the letter above, and suggest Mr. Leifer’s explanation (and termination of his staffer) are largely the work of a marketeer trying to once again get a grip on his spin…This [accentuates] how suspicious folks in the online world are of bad marketing, and how quickly credibility erodes when one’s company does something dumb.

I couldn’t agree more with his conclusion. That’s why it’s critically important that businesses make understanding the blogosphere a high priority before something like this happens. The staffer in question should have been educated about working with bloggers before being given an assignment that put her into direct contact with the blogosphere.

Of course, Leifer did the right thing by apologizing. And his e-mail goes a long way toward damage control, but as of today, a Google search for the firm pulls up our previous post about the incident before Guerilla’s own site (see screenshot).

This was unintended on our part, but it does highlight what can happen to a company when the blogosphere starts to pay attention to a negative incident. Just look at the Warren Kremer Paino Advertising debacle this past May. At the height of the scandal, there were maybe nine or ten bloggers ahead of WKPA’s own website on Google (I wish I’d taken a screenshot).

I could wax poetic about the immense power of the blogosphere, search engine marketing and how businesses need to pay attention - but it’s all been said before. Obviously there are a lot of people out there who still don’t “get it.” But with Dell starting a blog, Leifer apologizing and Nestlé responding to criticisms, I think the tide just may be turning.