Marketing Chutzpah

One of the most valuable pieces of wisdom solution providers pitching managed services to IT managers should adhere to is to avoid promoting the services as a replacement for IT staff. For obvious reasons.

Equally obvious should be the realization that pitching a news release to reporters with the following headline doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense:

“How to Bury Negative, Unflattering Company News on the Web”

Call it marketing chutzpah. Or, more likely, misdirected marketing, something this industry knows a thing or two about.

The news release in question came from a company called PressReleasePros.com, which is pitching a way of using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) “to bury negative blog postings” about a client’s company. So if your company has been the object of ridicule by a blogger, or perhaps deserved criticism, the brain trust at PressReleasePros.com is presumably going to show you how to prevent people from finding those blog entries.

I’d say beware of taking advice from any company calling itself PressReleasePros, considering the Associated Press tossed out the term “press release” more than 20 years ago in favor of the more accurate and more relevant “news release.” Any company pitching to journalists should stay current on such things.

But perhaps that is nitpicking. More troublesome is the idea of trying to teach companies how to “bury” negative postings, if that is even truly possible. If your goal is to provide marketing advice to companies that need it, perhaps you should focus on counseling them to avoid being written about negatively in the first place.

And as any successful solution provider will attest, negativism is best avoided by giving your customers reliable, valuable services that help them achieve their business goals.

Now let’s see how PressReleasePros manages to bury this blog posting.