UPDATED: Fortune hack outs least favourite PR agency tactic

Fortune journalist, Adam Lashinsky, seems to have picked up on the zeitgeist for hacks’n’flacks outing poor behaviour by one another, started by blogs by Badhack and Bad Pitch Blog.

In an interview on Guy Kawasaki’s blog we see the following:

Q. What is the dumbest thing a company or its PR firm has ever done to get your attention?

A. Outcast PR on behalf of Salesforce.com stands out for sending
every imaginable piece of crap under the stars. It’s become a joke in
the journalism world. You can walk around the offices of Fortune and see footballs and other paraphernalia, and you say, “Yeah, I got that too.”

Ouch. He refuses to be pressed on the relative merits of Apple and Microsoft PR teams, but seems happy to take a pot-shot at those guys.

* * UPDATE: In fairness, the previous headline to this post was misrepresentative of his comments – I apologise to Mr Lashinsky and Outcast and have changed the headline. He didn’t say that Outcast were his least favourite PR agency, it was the freebie tactic they used that he was talking about.

I still stand by "ouch" though.

And I still stand by favourite as the correct spelling. You don’t have to use American English on blogs, as far as I know ;-) * *

2 responses to “UPDATED: Fortune hack outs least favourite PR agency tactic”

  1. Adam Lashinsky Avatar
    Adam Lashinsky

    I think you’ve mischaracterized my comment. In fact, your headline writing is worthy of tabloid sensationalism at its worst. The question narrowly asked me the dumbest thing a company has done to get my attention. That I poked fun at Outcast and Salesforce hardly speaks to my opinion of them as PR professionals. So I wouldn’t compare a comment on footballs with an unwillingness to discuss Apple and Microsoft’s PR abilities. Oh, and you misspelled “favorite.”

  2. Thanks. And kudos for taking my spelling guidance in the spirit in which it was offered!

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