Yankee Group public relations boarded a roller coaster last week. On the upside, their *former* PR agency of record won an award — for facilitating 1,400 mentions of Yankee and/or its analysts in the business press. On the downside, Yankee issued a press release on operating system reliability that was sure to fan flames among its Linux detractors. Imagine their glee — the detractors’ glee, that is — on discovering factual errors in the release.
To get a sense of the tallies here, the press release on Yankee’s OS reliability study resulted in more than 700 derogatory reader comments at Slashdot in less than 24 hours. And, that was just on Slashdot…
Managing to deepen the agony, a Slashdot reader posted his/her email correspondence with Yankee regarding the errors in the press release. Whatever the reality, Yankee ended up looking like it was responding to the situation as a result of this reader’s correspondence on the wave of Slashdot comments.
This circles us back to the Racepoint Group award. It honored Yankee Group PR performance in the category of “Response to Breaking News”.
Ouch.
It’s a pity, because Racepoint has been doing good work for Yankee. They deserved a bit of basking. Maybe they Yankee Group can apply for PR awards in new, participative categories… like “Response to Blogger Bludgeoning”?
* CORRECTED, June 14, 2006: Dan Carter, vice president at Racepoint Group, was in touch to clarify that they have not been the agency of record for Yankee Group since the end of 2005. Racepoint was not involved in any way with the OS release.
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