There is no shortage of bad customer experience stories out on the web. And it's still amazing to me in these days of self-publishing, epinions, yelp and other reviews and feedback-oriented sites that companies would open themselves up to negative sentiment because of bad service or bad judgement on the part of an employee. Or, if they did, make sure to immediately to do right by those they ticked-off and retain them as customers/users/evangelists.
So it's even more suprising when I hear of a company working in the PR space suffer one of these gaffs and not do anything to rectify the situation. Apparently, such is the case with Profnet, PRNewswire's reporter query service. Peter Shankman, who's blog is always an interesting read has a large and growing Facebook fan base. From that he's created a "service" (and I use the term lightly because it's not something he's charging for) for other PR folks where he relays reporter queries to those of us who've requested we be alerted to them via Facebook. His group is called "If I can Help A Reporter Out, I Will" and it's an irregular emailing of queries reporters put to Peter's group. Reporters dig it; PR types-dig it, and Peter gets a bunch of goodwill from all sides. No harm, no foul right?
Apparently Profnet didn't feel the same way. AFTER trying to squeeze Peter out of the goodwill business, Profnet let him know (and by way of Peter's blog, all of us) that smaller PR players aren't too important to them. Seems like a bad way to communicate a business strategy change.Peter's post about it is here and the comment string is a fun read. There really is something to all this 'going around rather than through, disintermediation power to the people' type-stuff.
