Sarah Lacy wrote a response to the blogosphere's reaction over Cuil that I thought was very interesting.  For those who don't know Cuil (pronounced "cool") is a new search engine founded in part by a high profile ex-google employee.  When Cuil was ready to launch they briefed high-profile bloggers about the technology and how revolutionary it was but didn't give them an advanced look at it. 

This led to a bunch of blogs writing glowing praise for the startup only to try it and realize the product...for lack of a better way to put it...stunk.  The end result was that many blogs began the day with a post praising Cuil and ended the day with a post bashing it. 

The question Ms. Lacy raises is "who is culpable for this PR disaster?"

So yeah, they screwed some things up. But doesn't part of the blame go to the blogosphere? I'm counting me in that too. I was probably too effusive. Like everyone else in the Valley, I find technology and new companies exciting and Cuil has a great story. But you don't make up for that by then eviscerating a company. It doesn't somehow balance out in the greater cosmic order. TechCrunch says the whole thing was Cuil's fault because they didn't let pre-briefed bloggers use the service. Ok, that was dumb, but take some responsibility!

This is probably the only place where I vehemently disagree with Ms. Lacy.  This is entirely Cuil's fault and in fact they violated what may be the most cardinal rule of being successful which is that you should always try to set others up to succeed.  Regardless of whether the blogosphere is right or wrong they were predictable and Cuil set up a situation in which they were very clearly going to come out looking foolish.  That, to me, puts the blame completely on them.

Ms. Lacy goes on to say...

At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn't it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?

If we've got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that's not Cuil's fault. And I don't think it's serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?

I don't really disagree with Ms. Lacy here as much as I think what she's saying is of little consequence. 

In my experience, individuals can change how they react to the world but cultures really can't.  A cultural reaction will persist no matter what.  Society might become more enlightened in how they view the world but that only changes what they react to not how they react.

Let me see if I can make that clearer.

The colonies that eventually became the United States developed an aristocracy very quickly.  These aristocrats largely treated the commoners with disdain because those commoners were seen as different and hence inferior.  Then immigrants started flooding in and suddenly the native commoners weren't so strange anymore which led to the aristocrats and the native commoners treating the immigrants with disdain.  Then people with different skin color came along and they were the different ones.  and so on, and so on, and so on...

So what was considered "different" constantly changed but society's reaction to those who were different stayed the same (and has to this day).  Because society's reactions don't change.

In that same sense, you can say (as Ms. Lacy did) that the blogosphere needs to break itself from "having to get a story two seconds before the competitor" but you have to accept that it never will.  She might make that change in herself but the blogosphere will remain the same.  Which brings me back to my point.

If you have a startup and you are getting ready to reveal it to the world you have to plan for the scenario as it is and not how you wish it would be.  The fact that the blogosphere makes knee jerk reactions might be disheartening to an extent but it gives the situation predictability which is golden in PR. 

In the end, the blogosphere's tendency to react is as much a gift as it is a curse.

I used to read Jeff Jarvis' blog daily and I still think he's worth listening to but eventually his rants just wore me down.  I came across this one via TechMeme though and wanted to address it. 

In a post entitled "What PR won't fix" he attacks Wal-Mart for suing a former employee who was hit by a truck and who suffered brain damage because of it.  The employee was awarded $1 million dollars after suing the truck company responsible and Wal-Mart is legally entitled to some of that money because they paid for her medical care up to that point.  So Wal-Mart sued the employee to get a part of the settlement (about $400,000 of it).   

Now, I agree with Mr. Jarvis that Wal-Mart was stupid to go after this money and that it doesn't reflect well on the company.  Where I disagree with him is here...

No amount of PR and no number of company blogs can make a bad company look good — or smart. Wal-Mart is the poster pig for that lipstick. Again and again, they prove themselves to be mean, greedy, and stupid. Again and again, they and their PR people are forced to apologize. And it’s clear: They never learn. The culture remains venal. Management remains blind to the fact that their moral myopia is bad for the brand and bad for business. Even the PR company, Edelman, fails to realize that this is bringing them down — who’d want to trust them after they keep throwing themselves on swords for Wal-Mart and who’d want to hire them given Wal-Mart’s horrid reputation — and they’d be better off resigning the account, no matter what it’s worth. Greed is usually such a simplistic explanation for bad behavior but in this case, it explains everything. This wouldn’t be so incredibly apparent if it didn’t keep happening over and over and over again.

Wal-mart is not a bad company.  Bad companies do not become the largest public corporation in existence.  Wal-Mart is a monolithic company though and that size creates PR issues by definition. 

On this issue, I sincerely doubt Wal-Mart management even knew about all this until it blew up in their face. Without knowing the internal workings of Wal-Mart I can almost guarantee that no one even looked at the issue until it got passed to the lawyer litigating it.

So there may be one low level lawyer out there who realized what was actually going on but beyond that an issue like this just gets rubber stamped down the line.  No one is going to actually look at it and in a company as big as Wal-Mart that's unavoidable. 

Everything gets proceduralized when you have 2 million employees to look after and some times people make honest mistakes when writing up those procedures. 

The real PR issue isn't that Wal-Mart is evil but that big corporations work like this by nature.  So they are going to create these types of problems no matter how vigilant management is.  No one group of people can track every corporate issue that arises in a company as big as Wal-Mart.  More to the point, their PR firms should know this and be prepared to deal with these issues. 

Assuming something like this is inevitable is something Edelman should have done when first getting the account and they should have made preparations for it in advance.  If I were them, I would have asked Wal-Mart for an emergency fund controlled by Edelman that could be used in this type of incident.  That way Edelman could act at the first sign of trouble rather than having to battle through the Wal-Mart bureaucracy. 

Had Edelman done that they could have come in after the first article was published and (a) apologized, (b) explained how these things happen in a big company and how Wal-Mart regrets it and (c) given the family a couple hundred thousand dollars extra for their trouble.  Then the story becomes one of Wal-Mart's contrition and generosity rather than their, as Jeff Jarvis put it, "meanness". 

A couple of days ago Om Malick posted an interview of Ray Ozzie which got me to thinking about something entirely different.

The interview is a good one though and worth checking out.

But what it got me thinking about was whether it pays for Microsoft to give this interview to a big site like GigaOm in the first place?  Taking a look at Techmeme I saw most blogs covering the interview just repeated the original contents which, in my experience, is what often happens in the blogosphere. 

So Microsoft's goal, to get their message to all GigaOm readers, could be achieved without giving the interview straight to them.  The blogosphere is an arena where news flows up as quickly as it flows down.  If they gave the interview to a smaller site the story would still end up on GigaOm within a day.

So the question is: could Microsoft have gotten more mileage out of going to a lesser blog?  I think so and I think it was an opportunity missed on their part.  Public Relations is the art of squeezing as much goodwill as you can out of every move you make.  Microsoft didn't do that here.   Ask yourself, doesn't it look a lot less like pandering when a big company goes to a smaller blog?  On that note, isn't the smaller site a lot more grateful to get the interview?

The truth is, it makes Microsoft look tons better to go to a smaller site and it still achieves everything they got by going to the bigger one. 

That's why, when I hear bloggers go on about the death of PR I have to chuckle.  PR isn't dead its just changed into a more dynamic environment which means you can't just go to the big guys and feed them a story anymore.  PR pros and those who do their own PR need to look at blogging patterns and figuring out how to use them in the most effective way.

Don't get me wrong, a company like Microsoft still needs to curry favor with the big sites like GigaOm but they're better off doing that in the background.  Things like feeding exclusive tips aren't seen by the public and are more valuable to the bigger sites than a pre-canned interview anyway.  This allows companies to give the interviews to smaller sites who will praise them endlessly for a story that would be nothing more than a blip on the big site's radar.