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Startups - Is all press good press?
10 points by liad on July 7, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
Have been lucky enough for my new startup Shoply (social commerce platform) to have been featured on a few major blogs recently.

The features were positive and I am super grateful for them, but they contained factual errors regarding our feature set and competitive landscape etc which as a result erroneously bought into question facets of our strategy.

We provided the blogs with information prior to their posts which obviously contained the correct information and tried to ensure the journalists were well informed prior to posting.

If you've had similar occurrences in the past, how have you dealt with them?

1 - Contact the journalist and risk being a pain and jeopardising a future relationship by asking for the post to be put straight?

2 - Policing the comments and trying to get the correct story across there?

3 - Just let things be. And live by the motto "all press is good press"?



This happened to me recently. This is what worked for me:

Email the journalist privately (not via the post's comments). Say you've found a small error. Explain it and its fix. Then apologize for not being clear in the first place (which is at least a teeny bit true). Close with an invitation to talk by phone or email or Skype.

The two journalists I got in touch with were super friendly and nice. They genuinely cared about being correct.


Given blog posts are pretty painless to correct (unlike hardcopy news stories which may require an embarassing retraction), I would think a very friendly request to "correct an unfortunate misunderstanding" would be worthwhile...




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