Never Make Big Promises

Perhaps you already heard about the recent brouhaha that involves the hiring of a major public relations firm by a certain social networking company. According to Dan Lyons from The Daily Beast, it turns out that Facebook hired Burson-Marsteller to feed anti-Google stories to the press. One high-lever publicist even offered to draft an op-ed for a well-known blogger and then promised, yes promised, that he could get the piece placed in pubs like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.  

Unfortunately, for the Burson-Marsteller folks, the blogger not only turned down the offer but also published the emails that were exchanged. And you know what happened to those emails, right? Yep, they got posted online somewhere for everyone to see. (Just read The Daily Beast piece and you’ll get all the links there.)

Okay, everyone, please repeat after me: We will never promise our clients that we can place op-eds or anything else. We will always do are best, but we will never promise. Oh, and add this, too: We will always think twice, three times and then once more for good measure before EMAILING something that could make us, our client and colleagues look really bad. 

That’s it. This is a short post but hopefully one that you will take to hear. 

And for even shorter observations, please follow me on Twitter @LeslieLevine.