Pro PR Tips

Steve Jobs to bloggers: Shut it down, we need your WiFi. Credit: James Martin/CNET

Our reporters just got back from the WWDC Stevenote. They say that when Steve Jobs said, “All you bloggers need to turn off your notebooks,” to free up WiFi bandwidth, Apple PR reps aggressively demanded that reporters comply.

This is not how the press works, people. You don’t get to shut us down to make your demos work better.

And not like it should play a part in this conversation, but I’ll say it anyway:  No reporter worth his or her paycheck relies on either public WiFi nor AT&T’s pathetic data network to cover events that matter. We have EVDO (Verizon or Sprint) for that. You don’t own those. And you don’t own us.

See CNET Reporter Erica Ogg’s story, Even Steve Jobs has demo hiccups.

Many journalists change their “beats,” or topic areas, frequently. It’s more frequent now than ever, with newsrooms shrinking. Editors have to constantly shuffle staff around.

So when you’re pitching, do one last check to make sure the person to whom you’re pitching is still covering your category. You certainly do not score points when you pitch a writer in a topic area they last covered “three beats ago.”

There will be a mistake. A bad one. Customers will be inconvenienced, damaged, frightened, perturbed, and angry.

Say you’re sorry. Then say what happened. Then say you’re sorry again. Save the soul-searching “This has been a bad day,” stuff for your spouse — because it’s been a worse day for many of your customers.

Do not try to publicly minimize the inconvenience your company’s foul-up has caused its customers. You don’t know what it’s like for them. Also, blogs will skewer you.

Over-apologize, over-compensate, over-fix. Do you want to be Toyota?

Check out these apologies.  Both help a bit, but they have flaws that could easily have been avoided. Can you see them?

A long day at McAfee

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