Seriously, try to be professional. There’s no reason for going totally over the top with a PR/marketing person, especially in a public way (remember Tip #20: Don’t air your dirty laundry).
Check out this Twitter exchange between (soon to be former) National Post reporter David George-Cosh and April Dunford, founder of Rocket Launch Marketing. As David might say: un-fu@k!ng-believable. See full MediaStyle report here (by Ian Capstick).
Interestingly, Mr. George-Cosh seems to have deleted the tweets from his account, but they’ve been preserved below and over at MediaStyle.
Thanks to @VaENew and @NicolePRexec for pointing out this Reporter tip!
Update: The National Post published an apology over the incident, and April Dunford blogged about the experience as well. I certainly agree with Aril’s “apologize and move on” point; if there was an immediate apology I think the whole incident wouldn’t have had enough steam to get off of the ground.
dslunceford
5 Comments
February 11, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Gotta love a public meltdown. Hopefully *I’ll* always maintain my cool, despite some of the PR shenanigans I encounter.
As someone who’s been posting online starting in oh maybe 1991 on various BBSs, Usenet, etc I think I’ve got it under control. Less is more.
February 11, 2009 at 7:19 pm
And don’t forget to credit @iancapstick for catching and saving the whole exchange for further review.
February 11, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Thanks Shawn, while I did link back to his article at MediaStyle, I should have pointed out that Ian Capstick was the author.
February 11, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I dunno. While I’m not going to argue that he acted rationally or professional, I have to feel sorry for the guy now that this total non-event has given him enough unwanted publicity to probably hurt future work. Why is this considered news? Are people really this petty?
June 21, 2009 at 4:08 pm
That PR person shouldn’t have posted that tweet in the first place. That was very unprofessional and immature.