satisfy your customers with action
Many tech companies seem to have serious issues with public relations. Often, when getting slammed with bad press, they try to stand up in the face of it and defend themselves. This is generally counterproductive from a PR standpoint.
- It’s a waste of energy. Your company has limited employee resources. Responding to public criticism will take people away from achieving whatever goals you are working towards as a company. Even employees not professionally involved with PR will be paying attention to the situation, and it will diminish their productivity.
- Despite the familiar adage, not all attention is good attention. Drawing attention to public criticism, even when you have strong counterpoints, leaves you participating in a perceived argument, and unfortunately, you can never convince everyone of your viewpoint.
- Defensive is not a good look on you. Every time you stand before the media in response to criticism people see your company as reactionary. You didn’t start the conversation. Someone else already has the upper hand. People are seeing your company act on the defensive, and that diminishes your public image.
Two contemporary examples I can think of where tech companies have acted along this vein are Adobe and Cultured Code.
Adobe seems to have no problem letting employees light up the blogosphere with refutations over the diminishing value of Flash. There have been many such posts and tweets this past year, primarily reacting to Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on iOS and Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash. Some posts had a cruel and accusatory edge, and some statements even ended up being retracted. It hardly paints a nice picture for their company.
Cultured Code, creator of the productivity tool Things, has had a PR firestorm over their lack of over-the-air syncing. They recently began a series of “State of Sync” posts on their corporate blog, detailing the troubles they’ve had, and their position moving forward. Bringing up the discussion has only further frustrated users, and driven many to competing products which haven’t had similar woes developing a syncing solution.
That was all a long prologue to say this: your company didn’t start out with the goal of having the best PR image in the tech industry, you started it to make something. If you have something to say to the public, do it by executing on your best skills, creating something.
Adobe, no one cares what you have to say about Flash. Want to prove the critics wrong? Show us some mobile devices where Flash actually works. Better yet, make us something new that’s even better.
Cultured Code, it’s great that you know you’re having a problem with syncing. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really help anyone until you have a solution for your users. The time you’re taking to write posts is being perceived as time not spent fixing the problem.
Companies shouldn’t be writing posts responding to naysayers. Do what you set out to do from the beginning. Make what you make, do a good job, and people will heap on praise. Otherwise, you’re just making yourselves look bad.