PR 2.0

To many bloggers, PR has become synonymous with spam. Last week the Enterprise Irregulars had a discussion with 95% of comments negative on PR - mostly about how it is still one way, controlled messaging, and not facilitating conversations. How it is often irrelevant to areas we cover.  Bad enough that one of the EIs Anshu Sharma started a new blog Your PR sucks

Well, this post is about 2 recent more positive episodes - in both cases I have initiated the conversation. And importantly, the conversations have been about disagreeing with the vendor's CEO and in the other, a discussion of its competition.

Josh Purdy at the PR firm Weber Shandwick faithfully sends me Lawson press releases. Yesterday, I replied to one of his emails requesting CEO Harry Debes see my blog post about Lawson.

Within a few minutes Josh replied: "Thanks for the heads up, though you won’t be surprised to know we did see your blog already, and yes, we will be able to provide a statement from Harry in reply, so stay tuned."

In normal PR one-way traffic style, I had expected silence in return. Especially since I took an opposing view to Harry's. Not sure Harry will respond, but I appreciate the fact Josh has requested he does.

I am already a big user (and fan) of BlueAnt's bluetooth sepakerphones. Lauran Driver at Porter Novelli recently had me try out their latest version. 

I then asked her for a favor. My wife wants to use her favorite Plantronics headset designed for the landline with a cell phone. Most cell phones either support a Bluetooth headset or a speakerphone. What we want is a bluetooth dog tag or pendant which allows to plug in the Plantronic. And by the way its needs to support a 2.5 mm, not the standard 3.5 mm outlet.

I posed her the question - would BlueAnt engineers have a clue if such a product existed in the market. BlueAnt does not have such a product and could have politely said so, and ended the conversation.

But they went through a few rounds of suggestions about Jabra and other competing products. Through all this, Lauran acted as the conduit. BlueAnt is based in Australia, and she endured the latency in the conversation back and forth.

She need not have, but she did, and we may have found a solution. Within the Plantronics family.

Josh encouraging his client to converse on a not-agreeable blog post. Lauran encouraging a conversation even around competitive products. Small moves towards PR 2.0.