Friday, October 10, 2008

Company Outrage Online

Clean Air Gardening in Dallas, TX, has launched a Web site alleging egregious and horrible mistakes made by its former IMC agency, Christie Communications based in Santa Barbara, CA. 

Among the allegations made by Clean Air Gardening's President, is that Christie Communications provided poor quality deliverables (press releases and media kit materials) and violations of process (company alleges press release was not reviewed or approved by Company POC for distribution and among other things, that company location was wrong). Check out the link above for more info.

Again, WE DON'T KNOW what Christie Communications side of the story is (and I doubt we will since agencies generally (really shouldn't) talk about client relationships, but let this serve as a cautionary tale to other PR professionals and agencies - if you do a bad job, companies have the option to bad-mouth you online to a global audience. Be prepared to defend yourself and your work.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The site even has updates, like one from today where they respond to a certified letter.

Evidently, the PR firm discovered that the website exists and isn't happy about it. Perhaps the other side of the story will continue to emerge.

Anonymous said...

Glad to see someone else writing about this too. What is interesting is that the Web is rapidly turning into the court of today ... see this WSJ story for a great example of how business is taking matters into its own hands and not waiting for courts. http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/09/26/web-site-lets-businesses-expose-deadbeat-customers/