Friend and fellow blogger Michael Krigsman has a very popular blog highlighting IT failures he comes up against, from time to time I seem to do the same for public relations failures – continuing with this theme I thought I’d recount the latest experience I had.

A month ago I received an email from a PR company suggesting that I meet with a certain individual who seeming had very high credentials. The stated purpose of this meeting was to discuss a particular cloud purchasers council and in particular to discuss industry direction and trends that he saw affecting the market.

I took an hour or so out of a busy schedule at a conference to be pitched by this individual about a new company he was setting up – the meeting was a debacle – he was in equal parts arrogant and boring and I came away knowing nothing substantive about the alleged buying council nor the new company. All I had was a feeling that I’d somehow been talking to the mob.

Fast forward four weeks and I receive and almost duplicate email from a PR person within the same agency. Naturally I had a chuckle and emailed her back mentioning the previous contact.

So, a couple of issues arising from this:

Systems – CRM isn’t such a hard thing to do anymore, hell, there’s even a cloud vendor or two who provides economic CRM solutions! For a PR agency to have no tracing of media contact is, quite frankly, ridiculous. It makes them, and more importantly their clients, look amateur (not so much of an issue in this case)

Abuse of an industry forum – I wonder how the “world’s leading industry association focused on improving business effectiveness for service providers and their suppliers” feels about their name and one of their forums being used as a shallow introduction to pitching a new business idea. I’ve lost all faith in this particular forum and, to a certain extent, the industry body itself.

So there’s my rant for the day – terrible performance on the part of the agency, but even worse the ethics of the person they’re representing.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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