Technology PR people never listen
Whenever I need to review a new device for my more sane blog (tbtechblog.blogspot.com), I go through this process (as if we had never reviewed something from this particular company before. Let the company be HP).
1) Contact HP’s internal media department;
2) We are referred to their ‘personal relations’, or PR, company who manage annoying journalists like me for them;
3) PR company establishes a professional relationship, with printed agreements, with us.
4) We establish a delivery and pickup date for the first device we will review from them;
5) The product is delivered and picked up as specified.
It’s always on that pesky fourth step that they falter. Between steps three and four, I have set a clear date that we would like the upcoming device to be dropped off and picked up; however, they always come back with a starkly different date as if we never told them anything at all.
After a few frantic emails from me to re-arrange a time which is suitable for us, not them (because they have all week in which they can deliver anything), they often make an excuse such as ‘Oh, sorry, didn’t see your prior email’ or, ‘I wasn’t thinking about what you’d told me previously.’.
To which, I can only be forgiving and kind. I can’t blow my head off at these people – or goodbye ‘that company’. And although I realise their busy, with tens of journalists leeching off them for the latest gear – but surely a nice tracking system could be used to keep track of the dates that we as time-constrained journos have already told them.
